Mozilla to UK regulators: VPNs are essential privacy and security tools

Nineteen Eighty-Four is a further rumination on how Joseph Stalin held power. It was meant to inform Orwell's fellow English socialists, who still dreamed of their own revolution, what the practical upshot of that would be. Stalin did not rule by people ceding their freedoms in exchange for comfort; they suffered intense hardship! Their land was taken from them, dwellings and vehicles allotted based on party loyalty and forced labour regardless of wage. But Stalin ruled through fear, within his party and without. His secret police looked everywhere for dissent and punished it severely. They bugged people, followed people, cultivated informers, asked children to inform on their parents, tried to instill loyalty to the state over and above their own family... they "disappeared" people (either shooting them or sending them to gulags), sometimes entire families. To send a message to any other potential rebels. And unsurprisingly, people wanted out. It was already illegal to leave the USSR without permission, the Berlin Wall was just the most prominent part of that. One of the reasons people stayed in the USSR was because even if they had a chance to escape, they knew the party would punish their family. This is the real world that Orwell amped up. The "memory hole" is code for Soviet censorship, which was rife - see the NKVD commissar vanish here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_images_in_the_So...

You're extremely naive about China. Do you think they wanted the Great Leap Forward and the Eliminate Sparrows campaign? One man's ill-informed policies caused a famine resulting in 15-55 million deaths. The One Child Policy? The state response to Tiananmen Square protests? The Great Firewall? The Social Credit system? Why does Foxconn have anti-suicide nets? You think industry tycoons being in bed with government is bad? It is! Now note that the theory of the Three Represents is part of the Chinese Constitution. Ask yourself why notionally independent Hong Kong imprisoned a large number of pro-democracy campaigners. These are not signs of a benevolent dictatorship. It's a totalitarian state maintaining its dominance over the masses and its elites revelling in the spoils. Why do you think there is such a push by rich Chinese to get their capital out of the country?

Perhaps you should read Brave New World instead?

I think this is a genuinely difficult problem that happens to look exactly like what you’d need for extended surveillance. When I think about it seriously, I end up coming up with the idea of a whitelist enforced on device for local accounts used by children.

This would probably block most of the internet, and allow access only to sites that are validated as being safe. This would put a lot of pressure on sites and service providers to ensure safety, such as children-only walled gardens within their broader services.

We already have piecemeal attempts at something like this through on device private age restriction software, but it’s not organised at the state level, and I think it’s not effective enough as a result.

If legally enforced it could be made into a pretty effective system that would give adults freedom and anonymity and provide safety for children, while pushing the costs of child safety onto the platforms, which is where it belongs. If you want to cater to children, prove that you can make it on to the whitelist. Otherwise that’s an audience you’re just not able to access.

Well true but wait until you do something else and they pile that on top of it.

> of observing the stated goals, which differ from the purported goals.

The problem is precisely that it doesn't show that. The Online Safety Act is, on this public explainer, described as legislation that provides protections to multiple groups. What they say in paragraph two is that "the strongest protections" are offered to children, while paragraph three then calls out that "The act will also protect adult users".

What is described is a tiered set of protections that at its lowest protects everyone (including adults), and a set of more narrow protections that are only extended to children. It follows quite logically that you will only need to know the users age if you want to show content to adults that you are not allowed to show children.

The "categorization" they are discussing is another axis of "tiering". Smaller provides (in categories 2A and B) are imposed less duty of protection, according to the explainer to account for their "size and capacity".

With this context. I think it's quite clear that the comments about the targeting of Category 1 are completely pedestrian. It isn't supposed to apply differently to PornHub and Amazon, because both are large multinationals that have enough resources to uphold their imposed duty.

For this to reveal anything nefarious about age verification, it would have to be about the designations of "Primary Priority Content" and "Priority Content" which are the types of content you are allowed to show adults, but not children.

It is all intensely boring, so I can't blame the news from not wanting to cover it, but it is exactly the type of context you have to include when making quite extraordinary accusations of misleading the public.

How about this: nobody shall be unsafe online or offline, and the state shall guarantee it. That's a foundation you can build law on, instead of hoping every child got lucky with their parents.