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Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?

mullvad.net

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Re: Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?

#411

Post by acdha »

matchbok3 wrote: post #408
1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Without American capitalism you wouldn't have computers, the internet, ..." In fact, the internet was born out of the American military, i.e., government, and American universities, not "American capitalism" The first time I used this internet, there were rules against using it for commerce

The American military would not exist without the economic freedoms we have.

Dude, we get it, you’re a super fan but these are some intellectually lazy comments. Our military is powerful, yes, but if you want to make some exceptional claims you need to show your homework demonstrating that kind of claimed huge leap over other economies (China, Russia, Germany, etc.). Be sure to explain how Iran is doing so well for so much less.

Re: Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?

#412

Post by drnick1 »

loopback_device wrote: post #329
drnick1 wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without American capitalism you wouldn't have computers, the Internet, smartphones, AI, electric cars and countless other things. That, and the Costco hot dogs mentioned in another reply.

Except that the www came out of Switzerland, the first electric vehicles out of Scotland and Germany, the earliest descriptions of neural networks - also Scotland, and countless other things, like Rockets and whatnot, also out of Europe. But, sure, congrats on that ARPANet thing.

It is American ingenuity that turned academic curiosities like neural nets into usable products. The missing ingredient in places like Europe or Asia is not intelligence, it is a business friendly environment and the right incentives for entrepreneurs. This is why countries like China can copy existing stuff and make derivative improvements, but don't meaningfully innovate.

Re: Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?

#413

Post by fragmede »

bradford wrote: post #389
jonplackett wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've been battling with locking down my kid's devices for much of my life. I haven't found a parental control feature that works: we've tried several, but, generally, nothing survives the 'Hey, I'll just factory reset the device and start with a clean out-of-box-experience' bypass. Kids can figure this stuff out. Even when we thought that things were under control, kids can easily procure new devices. Many families d…

Get an iPhone and don't give your kid the password to the iCloud account. That password is required after factory reset to make use of the device.

Re: Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?

#414

Post by inetknght »

gizajob wrote: post #172
inetknght wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody forced them to use their real names and post countless pictures of their faces alongside No? You've obviously never been ostracized from your friends, family, or coworkers due to not using Facebook or Instagram or whatever the latest vapid social network is.

Never. Life in the real world is better without it.

I completely agree with you. Unfortunately, most of the world seems to disagree with us.

Re: Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?

#415

Post by matchbok3 »

acdha wrote: post #411
matchbok3 wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The American military would not exist without the economic freedoms we have.

Dude, we get it, you’re a super fan but these are some intellectually lazy comments. Our military is powerful, yes, but if you want to make some exceptional claims you need to show your homework demonstrating that kind of claimed huge leap over other economies (China, Russia, Germany, etc.). Be sure to explain how Iran is doing so well for so much less.

Um, where did I mention China or Russia?

Intellectually lazy? What are you even talking about? Stay on topic, you are embarrassing yourself.

Re: Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?

#416

Post by pocksuppet »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #103
asjgGa6 wrote: post #21

There isn't much left of the free Internet anyway. Search engines no longer work, all discussion forums are ranked/censored by interest groups, mail delivery is between large entities. Maybe we need an alternative set of root servers for a free Internet.

>Maybe we need an alternative set of root servers for a free Internet. Can't even do that. We'd need (ultra?) stable IP addresses, and the entities in charge of those don't hand them out anymore. We've sort of been cut out of the basic infrastructure to let us build stuff a second time.

You can still get a block on the grey market for (I believe) currently a 4-digit payment, which is not free, but it's quite accessible if you have any serious usage at all.

(It will be officially transferred to your name - there's nothing grey about the blocks themselves - the greyness is that RIRs officially forbid selling them, but they can't really do anything to stop it and they don't forbid buying.)

IPv6 blocks are still available from RIRs and you don't really have to care about anyone stuck in the 1980s if you don't want to.

Also each of the root servers is itself run by a different organization. If you had some clout, you could ask them to also host your alternate root server on the next IP address. Half of them are anycast blocks which means they likely have 253 addresses free as anycast blocks aren't really shareable.

Re: Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?

#417

Post by platevoltage »

djaro wrote: post #312
platevoltage wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If parents don't want their kids on social media, get them a dumb phone, or use the parental control features. Maybe some parents don't care, and that's their prerogative. None of this is about protecting children, it's about "protecting" adults from "bad ideas".

The problem is many parents will not do that. Do those children then deserve to be taken advantage of by social media corporations? Generally, things that are harmful and addictive such as alcohol, cigarettes and casinos require age verification. We dont just put the onus on parents because a child with bad or absent parents still deserves to be shielded from alcoholism at 12 years old.

Social Media companies taking advantage of people is a whole other conversation, and isn't just an issue with minors.

Re: Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?

#418

Post by pocksuppet »

tumult wrote: post #120
beej71 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trick is to stay small. If your network only has a few millions of people, nobody targets it.

Not true at all. Even small, insular, just-a-few-hundred users PHPBB-style forums have to run Cloudflare or Anubis to try to stem DDoS-style scraping, and have a constant patrol of moderators to stop AI spam posts.

Not true. You can also make your code fast enough so your server doesn't get overloaded by three requests per second. Then you can just handle the requests.

Re: Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?

#419

Post by pocksuppet »

nocman wrote: post #107
Gigachad wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it is overreach since its fairly simple to implement and non obtrusive. We have had multiple decades of failure from tech companies already to prove that they won't act on their own. If you are putting individual parents up against Meta, Google, etc, the big tech companies easily win. As we have seen already.

> I don't think it is overreach since its fairly simple to implement and non obtrusive Those two things have absolutely nothing to do with one another. Something being easy to implement is completely unrelated to whether forcing its implementation is overreach.

Which is why s/he mentioned both of them. *This* law is simple to implement *and* it's unobtrusive. It's actually a really good way to solve the problem without creating privacy concerns.

Re: Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?

#420

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #367
drnick1 wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without American capitalism you wouldn't have computers, the Internet, smartphones, AI, electric cars and countless other things. That, and the Costco hot dogs mentioned in another reply.

"Without American capitalism you wouldn't have computers, the internet, ..." In fact, the internet was born out of the American military, i.e., government, and American universities, not "American capitalism" The first time I used this internet, there were rules against using it for commerce

There was no advertising on the internet, originally

This was before the www

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