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

mullvad.net

501–510 of 561 posts

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

#501

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.

"The global Internets progenitor was the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) financed and encouraged by the U.S. Department of Defense. In order to understand the wonder that the Internet and various other components of the Net represent, we need to understand why the ARPANET Completion Report ends with the suggestion that the ARPANET is fundamentally connected to and born of computer science rather t…

To act like no private citizens or businesses contributed to the internet because it came out of DARPA is ignorant at best. DARPA literally pays private entities to do research for them to this day. It’s their primary mechanism for action. So confidently ignorant.

Take your Reddit tier America bad slop back to Reddit.

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

#502

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

American capitalism and the American government and its policies are intertwined. You are arguing literally nothing.

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

#503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

wish I had a good reply, and, distasteful as this comment might be. I'm open to giving a draconian response: Fuck you and and fuck your unwillingness to parent your god-damned kids

children should not be 1 or 2 clicks away from graphic internet porn at all times and your unwillingness to make any compromises in order to stop this is frankly embarrassing.

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

#504
post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many usecases for agents having access to a real browser and many usecases for humans where work wise it's useful or for agent success in completing the task. Including any specific situations where sites may block "controlled" browsers, as well as co-working. If an agent is controlling your own browser, it can get in the way of you being able to do work as well. Additional security control, if you have con…

So, if I as a website author would like to block the LLMs scarping my content or putting extra load and cost on my infrastructure, your project helps the actors who don't respect my decision and don't give a shit about consent to circumvent that?

That’s at the request of a user they aren’t operating autonomously.

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

#505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all, having to buy each account for $50 instead of spinning up thousands for free would shut down most botnets as the economics would no longer work. Second, the move toward identity verification will eventually make even selling accounts like this impossible. You can only sell your identity once. I stand by what I originally said, though I admit it was a bit inflammatory. Everyone wants to have their cake a…

>First of all, having to buy each account for $50 instead of spinning up thousands for free would shut Would cost them chump change. You've added an operating expense. When bot farms have giant walls of smartphones bolted into specially-designed rigs, that means they're already used to operating costs that are non-trivial. >Second, the move toward identity verification will eventually make even selling accounts like…

>How do you figure that?

Because it limits supply. The percentage of the population willing to do this will eventually run out of identities to sell.

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

#506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How do you verify someone’s age reliably without identifying them? Unless there’s some standard around zero-knowledge proofs they’re implementing that I’m not aware of, they’re probably going to end up identifying everyone as part of this system, since kids will try and bypass it and parents will demand it be made more robust. Kids will still bypass it no matter what we do.

You don't. The law we're discussing doesn't verify someone's age. Please stop calling it an age verification law, because that's completely disingenuous FUD.

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

#507

It'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.

Yes that's basically what the California law does. It says all devices shall have parental controls and they shall actually work. But I thought you hated it.

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

#508
post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not how any other thing that is banned for children is enforced. It makes no sense. The person selling the age gated item needs to take lawful measures to ensure they arent selling it to a minor. Their parents have nothing to do with it. Your solution would be that if a 14 year old walks into a liquor store and doesnt have a note from their parents saying that they arent allowed to drink alcohol, then the sto…

mandating devices provide a `NoAdult` setting, so so browsers could check it and then send something like a `x-NoAdult` header would give websites a reasonable method for distinguishing minors (or people that just don't want adult content). it's the old 80s/90s bead curtain separating the adult movies area from the rest of the video store. it keeps kids reasonably separated, and leans on parents making their kids min…

that's literally what the california law, that we keep calling an "age verification law" even though it has nothing to do with age verification, does

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

#509
post #380
post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Soon enough you will realize that kids spend more time with their friends than with their parents. Most parents want their kids to be curious, build autonomy, and feel free. For this to work, they need a safe space. There are to place to enforce a policy: client side (parental control) or server side (age verification). Personally I don't want to transform my kids general purpose computer into a locked down infotainm…

How are kids supposed to have a safe space "to be curious, build autonomy, and feel free" if they can't get out from the authoritarian hands of their parents or their government?

Good question. Maybe we can find the answer by getting them drunk at the strip club - two things that we'd be authoritarians if we prevented children from accessing.

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

#510
post #61

If you deleted all your social media and AI platform accounts today you would wake up tomorrow and be no worse off.

The "First they came for the Communists" logic still holds. When government able to open the flood gate, the mandatory ID check will be slowly and surely be everywhere. If you don't use social media and AI platform. Fine. But what about app stores, what about any registries from docker, to npm, to apk and toward the end source code repositories like Github/Codeberg?

First they banned the children from smoking cigarettes, and I did not speak out, for I was not a cigarette. Then they came for the murderers and pedophiles, and I did not speak out, for I was not a murderer or pedophile. Then they came for the carjackers, and I did not speak out, for I was not a carjacker. Then they came for the people who said "Free Gaza!", and there was no one left to speak for me.
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