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VPN use surges in UK as new online safety rules kick in

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Re: VPN use surges in UK as new online safety rules kick in

#951

Post by coppsilgold »

Veliladon wrote: post #765

This is one of the times where law is outrunning technology. Apple and Google are both working on anonymous attestation but they're pulling the trigger before it's ready. But that's not what laws like these are about. In the US at least these laws are driven by Christian Nationalists are setting up a situation where PII of porn users is able to be leaked. That's what they're counting on. They also want to have politi…

My understanding is that the way they do these attestations still links whatever account you did the attestation for and your real identity.

It's possible to do truly anonymous ZKP's of being a member of a set (eg. over 18s) but in practice it would be very cumbersome. It would involve having a setup with a central authority (government) to build a Merkle tree where users would submit hashes of randomness and then a user would generate a token through a ZKP that would decouple them from their real identity with the anonymity dependent on the set size. New participants can be brought in but the anonymity set sizes would fluctuate.

Even with this method it will link together all services utilizing the token. And if you attempt to solve this by allowing to generate multiple tokens the entire scheme becomes somewhat meaningless as durable bypass services would emerge.

Re: VPN use surges in UK as new online safety rules kick in

#952

Post by ta1243 »

kulahan wrote: post #908
faxmeyourcode wrote: post #902

Every day preteen boys around the world are destroying their premature brains by watching stuff that should be 18+ by simply clicking a single button that says "I am over 18". They form lifelong addictions that stunt their emotional and developmental growth at the click of one button. Many of these kids are never the same after their innocence is stripped. You can blame the parents for allowing them unfettered access…

I feel much the same way. This is a real headache of a problem for me because I'm pretty privacy-oriented, but this is a serious, serious problem that needs real intervention. Way too many kids are rotting their brains away either becoming gooners or clout-chasers. I thank God every day I was born too early to have access to this stuff as a kid. I can't imagine what this "you must always be online and also sexy" cult…

Give me the IP addresses of every site and I'll blackhole them on my router if I want to. That solves the home problem. I'll also ask why gambling sites, which litter sports broadcasting, aren't included, and indeed why gambling is allowed to be advertised to under 18s at all.

Doesn't solve the away problem, which is mainly 5g. I should be able to do that as the account payer.

Re: VPN use surges in UK as new online safety rules kick in

#953

Post by llamasushi »

Xelbair wrote: post #437
zaptheimpaler wrote: post #27

Basically every new law, piece of news or media I see coming from the UK paints a picture of a beat-down, cynical & scared society that's complacent to or in support of increasing surveillance and control by the government. Like maybe Adolescence or basically any mention of the NHS. The crimes they cite like child grooming or terrorism/hate being incited sound pretty terrible too, but I wonder why the UK specifically…

From tourist point of view UK felt to me like a police state, and I'm leaning more towards the former view. Cameras everywhere, non-stop reminders that you're being watched, being tracked everywhere(including which train car you're in now), constant reminders about possible dangerous bags being left alone etc. Tracking would feel helpful and useful, if not for constant oppressive reminders that "Bad Thing could happe…

> Whole trip felt more like what i would imagine visit to mainland China would be like rather than a trip to a free western country.

Have you ever been to mainland China? I've lived in both places and honestly, day-to-day life in major Chinese cities often feels more "free" in practical ways - safer, cleaner, more technologically convenient.

What is freedom really? In Shanghai or Shenzhen, I can walk out at 3am to get noodles or take the metro without a second thought. In LA or SF, I'm constantly aware of my surroundings, checking who's behind me, avoiding certain areas. The surveillance cameras in China never made me feel as watched as the constant threat assessment you do in many Western cities.

Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying China doesn't have serious issues with political freedoms and surveillance. It absolutely does. But the lived experience is way more nuanced than "oppressive dystopia."

I used to have similar assumptions before actually spending time there. Western media coverage (cough propaganda cough) tends to focus exclusively on the authoritarian aspects while ignoring that for many people, daily life feels safe, convenient, and yes - "free" in ways that matter to them.

Instead of imagining what China might be like based on western news coverage, why not visit and see for yourself?

Extremely unpopular opinion on HN, I'm sure. But I have a compulsion to challenge stereotypes when the reality is so much more complex.

Re: VPN use surges in UK as new online safety rules kick in

#954

Post by cooper_ganglia »

CaptainFever wrote: post #896
cooper_ganglia wrote: post #888

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, I'm for teenagers (not little children) having access to pornography. Anyone who supports literal children of any age viewing pornography needs their hard drives checked immediately .

Then you deserve all the censorship that comes your way. Treat others like you wish to be treated.

I don’t think censorship of nearly any kind has any place on the internet, but neither do kids.

It’s a parent’s responsibility to keep their children away from that type of content, not to hand them access to it so they can develop maligned, destructive ideas about sex, intimacy, and women.

Re: VPN use surges in UK as new online safety rules kick in

#955

Post by kulahan »

ta1243 wrote: post #952
kulahan wrote: post #908

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel much the same way. This is a real headache of a problem for me because I'm pretty privacy-oriented, but this is a serious, serious problem that needs real intervention. Way too many kids are rotting their brains away either becoming gooners or clout-chasers. I thank God every day I was born too early to have access to this stuff as a kid. I can't imagine what this "you must always be online and also sexy" cult…

Give me the IP addresses of every site and I'll blackhole them on my router if I want to. That solves the home problem. I'll also ask why gambling sites, which litter sports broadcasting, aren't included, and indeed why gambling is allowed to be advertised to under 18s at all. Doesn't solve the away problem, which is mainly 5g. I should be able to do that as the account payer.

That's great, but unfortunately most parents don't know how to do that, and as I've read recently, tech literacy is going down in younger generations, not up.

Re: VPN use surges in UK as new online safety rules kick in

#956

Post by lenerdenator »

thegrim33 wrote: post #616
lenerdenator wrote: post #495

This sort of thing is why the US has turned into a governance-averse society in some pretty bothersome ways. People suggest some sort of regulation for something, or some social service, often ones that are similar to those in the UK, and people who oppose it will point to things like this and use them to illustrate the slippery slope fallacy.

The US is a "governance-avere" society from conception. The Constitution decrees that the government should only have a few explicitly enumerated responsibilities, and nothing else. The country was set up such that the laws that affected a person were supposed to be from as much of a local level as possible. It was set up such that there wouldn't be some rulers (even if democratically elected) lording over the countr…

Given that there are some ideas from the UK that could do the US some good, yeah.

Re: VPN use surges in UK as new online safety rules kick in

#957

Post by cooper_ganglia »

BeFlatXIII wrote: post #931
cooper_ganglia wrote: post #888

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, I'm for teenagers (not little children) having access to pornography. Anyone who supports literal children of any age viewing pornography needs their hard drives checked immediately .

“Literal children”, by which definition?

By the definition of every major nation in the world, which is that anyone under 18 is a minor, which is a child who should not be intentionally exposed to pornography. Kids shouldn’t grow up viewing content that demeans women and distorts their worldview on sex and relationships, much less having the trusted adults in their lives advocate for them to watch it!!

Very bold choice to argue the nuance of “But how do we define ‘child’?” in a discussion about showing pornography to kids, though!

Re: VPN use surges in UK as new online safety rules kick in

#958

Post by cooper_ganglia »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #815
lemoncookiechip wrote: post #752

I've posted this before: We shouldn't need Age Verification checks for adults in the first place. Create a better, standardized, open-source parental control tool that is installed by default on all types of device that can connect to the web. The internet aspect of the parental control should be a "Per Whitelist" system rather than Blacklisting. The parents should be the ones to decide which domains are Whitelisted…

> Also, I'm for teenagers (not little children) having access to pornography. I'm against: pornography, as found in search results, is generally quite bad. Sexism, racial stereotyping, misrepresentations of queer issues: and that's just the titles . Page 3 has nothing on porn sites. Maybe I'm judging a book by its SEO spammers here, but I've not read anything that'd disabuse me of this notion: indeed, people raise co…

“Queer/Disabled techies post porn that I think is good for kids, which is great because otherwise children would have to just use PornHub” is a GREAT ideology to viscerally radicalize the majority of people against you AND the people you’re speaking about.

Re: VPN use surges in UK as new online safety rules kick in

#959

Post by mollymoffit »

cs02rm0 wrote: post #62
zaptheimpaler wrote: post #27

Basically every new law, piece of news or media I see coming from the UK paints a picture of a beat-down, cynical & scared society that's complacent to or in support of increasing surveillance and control by the government. Like maybe Adolescence or basically any mention of the NHS. The crimes they cite like child grooming or terrorism/hate being incited sound pretty terrible too, but I wonder why the UK specifically…

The UK is becoming increasingly authoritarian in ways that feel increasingly antagonistic to the majority of the population, regardless of political party. Taxes are rising (with tax take falling), crimes are going unchecked, just mentioning increased immigration gets a lot of people's backs up, but as GDP per capita continues to stall and even fall, the pressure it puts on services is a factor for many. And we're se…

You missed out the housing!! How local authorities who issue notices of bankruptcy while in the background buying up properties at full retail market prices. Knocking up rental prices beyond affordability. Shoplifting increasing costs of living on top of the large supermarkets profiteering since covid. Slum lords offered a guaranteed rents for a 5 year Contracts including the maintenance and any works required to bring it up to standard of conditions. To house illegal migrants, while these previously extremely poor housing our citizens was and still are forced to live in. Well not for long as no fault evictions are forcing these tenants out of their home. So shady and greedy slum lords can take full advantage of this home office offer , LL are rubbing their filthy hand's together
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