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The UK's war on anonymity has come to America

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Re: The UK's war on anonymity has come to America

#61
post #46

[flagged]

> I see you're putting "no internet access without scanning your ID" Other countries have already implemented this or are making strenuous efforts towards it. In Pakistan right now you need to submit a copy of your national ID card and scan your fingerprints to get a live LTE data service SIM card. This is not hyperbole but is real practice in some places that is soon going to be imported to jurisdictions that tradit…

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Re: The UK's war on anonymity has come to America

#62
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of us survived the internet when it was an even wilder west, IRC chats with strangers trying to learn perl, not putting your name and social security number into random websites. Being aware of predators. It's a very specific kind of power-hungry move fast and break things tech that refuses to accept responsibility of the fallout. Anonymity, the right to move privately and be private online is much bigger than…

It was a noncommercial wild west. You were up against some troll trying to get a reaction by linking you to goatse, not some trillion dollar international corporation with a literal army of addiction experts A/B testing how to maximize engagement.

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Re: The UK's war on anonymity has come to America

#64
post #6

The whole think of the children angle is so cursed. Used to push surveillance meanwhile actual harm against children goes ignored. See Epstein files and the grooming gangs in the UK If it actually did anything to protect the children it wouldn’t be so objectionable

What do you think about California AB1043?

Re: The UK's war on anonymity has come to America

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently put some thought into what I would have done if I had encountered "parental controls" to use the Internet when I first encountered it as a young teen in 1992. I would have made it my personal mission in life to circumvent everything and anything possible. I feel fortunate that no such controls existed and the adults in my life knew significantly less about the technology than I did. Was I exposed to some c…

I have a feeling we had a similar experience growing up. I generally agree, but also, we got QAnon/Alex Jones and such which have quite directly screwed up my country. So I don’t know, my opinion is often contradictory and fluid. I don’t know where I stand anymore. I believe in an “open internet,” but also, there’s people like Andrew Tate who have ruined the minds of people I care about. We can debate if these system…

One personal observation, the early commercial internet as it was transitioning from universities/research labs/certain high-tech firms into a mass market thing with millions of users, it had its share of nutjobs and crazy as well. But it was boutique, hand crafted , personal level crazy and it was for the most part disregarded because none of the whackjobs could collect a sufficient following or megaphone to spread their message.

For instance in about 1994 I remember coming across a set of textfiles that were some lengthy manifesto about how the US government had supposedly manufactured AIDS in a lab somewhere. But it never got any traction.

Now we have the unfortunate venn diagram overlap between something like a Tate and a major social media platform, and he can get his message out to millions of angry, horny, unemployed young men...

Re: The UK's war on anonymity has come to America

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tech people keep ignoring the fact that many people a) find the parental controls too hard to use and b) have no confidence that their kids won't find a way to circumvent them. If parents felt in control of technology they wouldn't be calling on governments to regulate it in the first place. I know a lot of tech people like to assume that government wants to control everything and these parents are fake front groups…

I recently put some thought into what I would have done if I had encountered "parental controls" to use the Internet when I first encountered it as a young teen in 1992. I would have made it my personal mission in life to circumvent everything and anything possible. I feel fortunate that no such controls existed and the adults in my life knew significantly less about the technology than I did. Was I exposed to some c…

My dad added parental controls to our PC sometime around 1997. It also had Eudora installed, which my dad used for email. Poking around, I found the ini file that had the ciphertext of the password for the email server. On a whim, I made another account in Eudora and put the ciphertext in as my password. In the ini, the plaintext of the password came out; I guess Eudora used some symmetric rot16 or xor like cipher! The same password worked to unlock parental controls, which had taken me just about a week to circumvent.

Re: The UK's war on anonymity has come to America

#69
post #46

[flagged]

> You should be banned. Statements like this are inflammatory—basically a personal attack—and ironically are much more likely to violate HN guidelines.

When the violation is so egregious, I think it's warranted. Posting this particular article should result in a ban from HN, and I stand by that.

Re: The UK's war on anonymity has come to America

#70
post #10

> These NGOs have converged upon a unified strategy: use the rhetoric of ‘child safety’ to advocate for digital ID laws that would prevent adults from using the internet anonymously. Of course. Anyone who brings up kids is trying to manipulate you into giving up your freedom for security. Whatever argument they make should be simply ignored and dismissed.

Worth noting that there's no security in a system that abusively collects your data. That goes for children as well.

Or guarantee that even if you provide such data to a nice, friendly, democratically run and ethically managed administration, that some future regime change to a completely different group of people won't result in catastrophic misuse.
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