Isn't age verification actually a good thing? If you want a free internet, you don't let your kids browse these websites. Otherwise, it allows you to make sure they aren't watching "hurtful" content.
Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?
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Re: Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?
#332Of course. Anyone who has even a little life experience knows that children, even more so, teenagers, will circumvent these measures, so they will fail at scale.
But what won't fail is the obligation to provide your id to 'verification providers', who are obligated to provide it to websites, all of which are obligated to hand over your identity to the authorities the moment they ask - the verification provider included.
So it's just mass surveillance, finally sold to the public through 'think of the children!'.
Re: Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?
#333It's absolutely a slippery slope - but most parents know how this is a very real thing as well. There's no controversy in having drugs, guns, alcohol, porn and other things 'behind the counter' - the intellectual debate over freedom of information is clouded by ideology.
Definitely the 'slippery slope' debate is worth having, but that's way more relevant than the 'should 10-year-olds be able to do whatever' (aka all or nothing internet) which I think, if we took a vote, most people would be fine with nominal age restrictions, on that basis and on that basis alone aka outside the 'scary government' issue, which is again, real and material but nevertheless a separate concept however pragmatically engulfed these things are.
Re: Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?
#334Isn't age verification actually a good thing? If you want a free internet, you don't let your kids browse these websites. Otherwise, it allows you to make sure they aren't watching "hurtful" content.
No, forcing everyone to verify their age is a terrible thing. That's not the same thing as keeping kids away from potentially harmful websites or people. That is positive, but it's awfully weird to enforce it by doing this terrible thing that hurts the open Internet when almost every single kid on the Internet is using a device and Internet connection provided by their guardian. Seems like we could figure something out that doesn't literally require every website to process your identification and completely destroy anonymity.
Re: Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?
#335Age verification is fine , at least in theory. It’s the implementations that are bad. More and more people agree that kids shouldn’t be on modern social media, including me. But most people also agree that mass surveillance is dangerous. The solution is to propose ways to block kids from modern social media (that actually works) without mass surveillance. Better parental controls, more parental education, and site-sp…
No, age-verification IS bad and is a slippery slope that will always lead to surveillance. If we don't stop this now everything will get worse. And trying to lump this in with other extreme rhetoric doesn't help. The answer is and always was "better parenting".
> "better parenting"
This has nothing to do with parenting. It's surveillance. They failed to do it through child porn argument. They are doing it through 'social media is harmful for children' argument. People did not bite on the former. They ate up the latter out of hate for social media platforms.
Re: Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?
#336It's absolutely a slippery slope - but most parents know how this is a very real thing as well. There's no controversy in having drugs, guns, alcohol, porn and other things 'behind the counter' - the intellectual debate over freedom of information is clouded by ideology. Definitely the 'slippery slope' debate is worth having, but that's way more relevant than the 'should 10-year-olds be able to do whatever' (aka all…
The point is there are much better ways to enforce this - like just setting up proper parental controls on a device.
Kids can’t buy their own phone. So parents can always enforce stuff at a hardware level if they set it up properly. It would be much better to just mandate that phones set up with a kid profile cannot access social media.
Re: Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?
#337One very simple way to give parents control over what their children see and participate in without violating everyone else’s privacy is to create adult and social TLDs and require these sites to migrate to them. So instagram.com becomes instagram.social, etc. Then mandate that all consumer network equipment mfrs and internet providers provide easily accessible ways to block these TLDs. Maybe combine that with some p…
This idea has been around as long as the web, but you can't get momentum behind it.
A much better idea was a .kids domain where the content was vetted, and you could allow-list your child's device to that. Much easier than trying to migrate everyone over to specific TLDs, especially when that ship has sailed already. But that never got traction either.
Edit to add: I used to work on "family safety" software. Blocking bad content doesn't work - it's too difficult of a problem. Walled gardens do work, however. The fact that there's not a push for the equivalent of an Apple App Store for kids is probably evidence of ulterior motives on behalf of regulators.
Re: Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?
#338Back to the internet's peer-to-peer roots. Many protocols besides the www The www became infested with so-called "tech" companies acting as intermediaries (middlemen) Lots of folks making money from surveillance ad system on the www. Oversized, unmanageable websites calling themselves "platforms" The www is an ad network. Not a great place for non-commercial activity Fortunately, the internet is more than the www. Th…
I have to admit, I'm kind of looking forward to what comes after the inevitable death of the www.
I2P already exists and is usable.
Re: Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?
#339Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would suggest that we should not conflate the internet with these corportate platforms. The internet still works fine for now . I can still stand up my own DoH resolvers, forums, chat servers, email servers, DNS servers, vpn servers, etc... Many social circles are bound to have a tech-nerd one or two layers removed. That used to be a pejorative. The hardest part is the psychology. People think they have to be on th…
In a way it is the bad players that are ruining it. Yeah I can setup all manner of servers for this stuff, but the instant I miss a patch or a patch is late to be developed and you can be compromised in no time. And unfortunately it just becomes a game of endurance between you and the army of folks trying to crack systems open. I have said it for decades, if there weren't bad players then we wouldn't need any of this…
For what it's worth I have been running my own things since the 90's and not yet compromised. I disable the CPU mitigations and have a minimal firewall configuration. I do keep things patched and keep an eye on news regarding the public services I run but only enough that I can still call it a hobby. I try to only expose daemons that have been battle hardened on the internet for decades. In the early 2000s I ran phpBB and that was a little risky and did require hardening php.ini
There really isn't anything utopian however, it's just a hobby and a way to let friends communicate without big brother putting their peanut butter in our chocolate. If you don't feel comfortable tinkering then of course don't. Never feel pressured. One can always start off sharing their services with a few friends and not advertise it globally. Find a hacker friend that can help pen-test your stuff. Perhaps even restrict access to your friends IP addresses or the CIDR blocks of their ISP's to limit access. Or use wireguard to restrict access to a VPN. If it's a web daemon just adding simple authentication with obscure usernames and good passwords in front of it will get nullify most of the bots until one is comfortable sharing it with the world.
Probably one of the riskiest things I have set up was just this week exposing Unbound DoH to the internet. Unbound has had a handful of security issues in the past. The HN crawling bots are getting confused by this weird thing listening on port 443 but they just can't figure out how to connect to it. If it gets popped I will just nuke that VM and revoke the cert. There's nothing sensitive on it.
Re: Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?
#340Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have to admit, I'm kind of looking forward to what comes after the inevitable death of the www.
I don't think WWW will ever die but I can see a hard split coming eventually. Most people will just put up with the current state of the internet for a long time yet.
Gopher and Usenet died