71–80 of 419 posts
20 years ago the boogeyman was "the terrorists!" And now the boogeyman is "not the children!!" Or "immigrants!!" Depending on your audience's political views, but the ultimate goal is more surveillance, more control and more power abuse by who’s in control.
A device-side IP filter locked behind a password that parents can configure in the device's settings would be much more effective and easier to implement than censoring the Internet. This should be the default solution, yet it's never brought up for whatever reason. Not to mention these online content censorship laws for kids are wrong in principle because parents are supposed to be in control of how they raise each…
I think putting parents in control is the right path, but will reveal a sad fact. Many parents aren't taking time to be in control, and no amount of legislation will fix that.
And cue the rise of self-hosted VPNs. 1 click to get a VPS instance, install VPN software, and make a connection. Automatically destroy the instance with another click or after a certain amount of time.
If this keeps going, they will ban self-hosting next: only government-approved hosts allowed. We can't just rely on technological solutions because you can't out-tech the law at scale. People need to actually understand that the government is very close to having the tools needed for a stable technocratic authoritarian regime here in the US and all around the world. It might not happen immediately even if they have t…
There are just a handful of corporations get to decide which websites are visitable every 90 days. Put a bit of legal pressure on the corporate certificate authorities and there's instant centralized control of effectively the entire web thanks to corporate browser HTTPS-only defaults and HTTP/3 not being able to use self-signed certs for public websites.
"Here's what happens if VPNs get blocked: everyone has to verify their age by submitting government IDs, biometric data, or credit card information directly to websites-without any encryption or privacy protection. We already know how this story ends. Companies get hacked. Data gets breached. And suddenly your real name is attached to the websites you visited, stored in some poorly-secured database waiting for the in…
People causing shenanigans using residential IPs if they ban VPNs is gonna lead to a lot of kicked doors, red herrings, lawsuits, and very probably ballooning budgets and will yet again fail to stop Bad Things™ not that it was really designed to anyway. I wonder if they think this is a good idea because they have machinations or is it just that they are clueless wealthy dinosaurs corrupting a future that isn't theirs?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The only way to block a VPN is to have the knowledge that certain IPs are used by VPN providers. It's pretty trivial for someone to run a script/app that spins up a server somewhere, installs VPN software on it, and uses that for the connection. Now there's no way to separate whether a user is connecting via a VPN or not.
It's pretty trivial for you or I. The average 12 year old who this law aims to protect doesn't know how to do that.
Kids are resourceful.
I'm reminded of efforts in the 1990s to ban strong encryption in email and websites because governments tried to tell us it was used by drug dealers and pedos to do their nefarious activities. Yes, governments really did want to force us to use HTTPS with only broken/weak crypto. Same propaganda, different buzzwords.
In hindsight, they really misjudged how comfortable pedos would be with discussing their affairs in plaintext email.
It's funny how democratic countries copy whatever laws authoritarian regimes passed, but with a 5-year lag.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If this keeps going, they will ban self-hosting next: only government-approved hosts allowed. We can't just rely on technological solutions because you can't out-tech the law at scale. People need to actually understand that the government is very close to having the tools needed for a stable technocratic authoritarian regime here in the US and all around the world. It might not happen immediately even if they have t…
Seems like a raspberry pi hidden at a library, restaurant, or anywhere with wifi would thwart this.
It's funny how democratic countries copy whatever laws authoritarian regimes passed, but with a 5-year lag.
The Great Firewall dates from 2003 and we still don't have a Great British Firewall so the lag seems longer.