The game Alpha Centauri had the most hard hitting quote that I think applies now.
"As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny...Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master. Commissioner Pravin Lal, 'U.N. Declaration of Rights' "
As reality shows - there's no such thing as carte blanche free flow of information.
Certain crimes are usually cited as reasons to inhibit information transfer, and rightly so.
There are other instances where we are all happy to have information prevented from being transmitted -
- Fraud
- Libel/Slander
- Harassment
- Threats (of a violent physical nature usually)
And, of course
- Spam
But we all pretend that when we say "Free to share information" that it excludes those (and other) things... which means that.. it's not free to share information...
Edit:
forgot to add things like (although maybe they can be included under the broad heading of 'fraud')
The above acts either carry no intrinsic information content and/or very few people apart of free-speech absolutists would be OK with them. They’re not evocative of the controversy at hand, and I can’t find anyone defending them.
Perhaps more appropriate:
* Instructions for making an illegal firearm
* Unpopular political opinions
* Instructions for engaging in illicit speech without detection
* Silently standing still with head bowed and hands folded in public
* Using a VPN
* Holding a sign at a protest
There are probably many more examples like the above, which would engender a more nuanced discussion.
I read on twitter, can't find the exact link, a chinese content site operating in .sg for many years, survived multiple "internet purges" by China, got banned by UK authorities last month.
I remember reading posts a decade or two ago on either Linode's forums or some other place like LinuxQuestions in broken English about tunneling through firewalls with ssh from I assume Chinese people.
I've started seeing posts like that from British people now. Absolutely wild. So much for the birthplace of common law.
The UK is where the US is headed if we don't grow a pair and snap out of this weak autocrat worshiping phase we seem to find ourselves in. It could happen so easily here.
Partisanship being the highest civic value in the US guarantees that we will not break out of that phase but will instead usher it in fully with two mildly different flavors. Coke and Pepsi autocracy with each insisting the other tastes like sewage and their own is ambrosia.
And yet so many look for the government to solve society’s ills, as if the “wrong government” will never ever take control. Perhaps we should all do more things for ourselves, and advocate for more laws that restrict what the government is allowed to do
This is a silly take. As soon as an authoritarian government takes power they just strip away the protections put in place to prevent abuse. The answer to preventing the "wrong" government from taking power is to have a strong "right" government.
This is a silly take. The answer to preventing one branch of the federal government from abusing power is to strengthen the other branches, and to strengthen federalism itself. Both are enshrined in the constitution and are the largest checks on growing executive power? In effect “weakening” any one part of the government.
The UK doesn’t have Texas or California or New York.
Looking at the current US, that seems to work not at all. The checks on power is only effective if enforced, and as there is no effort to enforce separation of powers, there are no checks.
This. The antidote to authoritarianism is a mobilized and motivated populace.
Liberals (small l) have spent 200 years being afraid of the masses and mass revolts, instead being enamored with pieces of paper that are supposedly holding everything up and keeping the forces of authoritarian reaction at bay.
The main difference between democracies and secular autocracies isn't that they have a vastly different approach to run-of-the-mill moral vices, such as prostitution or porn. It's that democracies tolerate a much wider spectrum of political opinions in public discourse and don't kill or imprison people who try to start an opposition party.
I think we can agree that the UK is moving in the wrong direction without drawing parallels to a place where dissidents are disappeared, both off the internet and in real life.
And then released when the mistake came to light. Not 'disappeared'.
The whole mess around the proscribed group is awful and seems like a massive overreaction - sure, you do not mess with a country's defence infrastructure. But the appropriate thing to do is arrest those involved and charge them with specific crimes, not misuse anti-terror legislation.
But lets not pretend people are being taken off the streets and made to disappear as they do in autocratic nations.
They have done it, and the west (over half the US states, the UK and Australia at a bare minimum) have entirely ceded any moral high ground regarding it.
Yeah we ceded it long ago in the US being reliant on child sweatshop labor for the lowest price possible and demanding allegiance to America but no obligation to provide each other any social welfare
Western countries had no morality before just a facade of one. Now that they are loosing economic power they are also loosing the ability to control the narrative.
This is beyond vague. What do you even mean by morality? And how is it better for non-western entity to allegedly control the narrative, except also using it for its own benefit, which would be immoral by definition?
'The West also does bad stuff' is not the same thing as 'China and the west are the same' or 'Russia and the west are the same'. That's a false equivalency. The west has a long tradition of respecting individual rights. You aren't going to get disappeared like you absolutely will in those places. Say what you will about the failings of the west, but there's a clear moral high ground there, even if that height is an inch tall.
Don't make up stuff learn your own history individual rights in the west have been by race, color, education, wealth or sexual orientation and easily forgotten when the individuals are not white.
It's just a different version of the same thing. In chinas case, they aggressively locked down internet influence. In the wests case, they held off a bit and made up bullshit reasons like saving the children with age verification. I cant stand this version of the 'free' west where they promote totalitarian information control and demand real IDs. This is nazi shit.
No one likes hearing hypocrisy from politicians, but it's one of their most dominant traits. That is, if you ascribe normal ethics and morals to them. But politicians' are a different breed, and the sooner we understand that, the better.
They will say, and do, whatever they perceive as being the most politically expedient thing to do. The ones that took moral stances in the actual best interest of the populace usually suffered politically for that. The ones that side with power tend to keep their power. This is the folly of political systems in general short of tyrannies, dictatorships, and kingdoms. And now we are seeing how democracies can be stretched into the same quality of life as so-called "lesser" systems but people don't like hearing that argument because the alternative is made out to be so scary.
It's not so much that democracy is the problem, but that it's too easy to sway people when it's so easy for money and power to be leveraged to manufacture consent. So now it's the people electing their own tyrants who will enrich and entrench themselves and being grateful for the privilege to be used for that purpose.
steps down off of soap box and stops yelling at clouds
Cambridge Analytica showed politicians in real time that on a population scale, hypocrisy doesn't make any difference. In fact people will bend themselves around to square the circle.
Politicians finally knowing for a demonstrable, data-backed, evidence-based fact that they can do basically whatever they want and keep their support as long as they just say they right things is what has brought us from 2016 to now.
Remember, half the population are under 100 IQ points.
And most general people I meet here in the USA are either heavily propagandized, extraordinarily dumb, or both.
We could be for "better and better, which is what the Chinese have been doing the last 50 years. Instead we've been at" fuck you I got mine haha", and "don't let THEM have anything".
Well, the out groups have sacrificed so they have no more. Now making the lower and middle and even upper middle class suffer is the name of the game.
I’m quite sure they don’t see it as hypocrisy. China censors the internet because they want to control everything about their citizens lives. But us? Oh, we’re censoring the internet to protect the children.
Always has been. What has changed is they now have the power to force their constituency to live with their hypocrisy and lies. Any effort to challenge the "leader" results in claims that you are now a "terrorist."
The internet was supposed to empower the citizenry. It's been captured and is now a tool used to suppress them. So now we see leaders completely unchallenged when their darker habits are exposed.
The free internet might be gone in the next decade. Probably time to buy a few hard drives and do some archiving. I don't just mean piracy. Articles, blogs, anything you find precious.
It sounds just as unfair as including a levy on blank CDs paid to music copyright holders, regardless of how the CDs are used. But being unfair doesn't mean it can't happen in your country.
> A common misconception is that levies are compensation for illegal copying such as file sharing. This is incorrect, however, levies are only intended to compensate for private copying that is legally allowed in many jurisdictions. For example, uploading a purchased CD on to another personal device such as a laptop or MP3 player.
"Private copying" is generally allowed under copyright law -- except that under DMCA, it's only allowed if you're not circumventing DRM. So for example, you can legally make a private copy of a CD, but not a Blu-ray disc.
> "Private copying" is making private copies of is generally allowed under copyright law -
Private copying is not generally allowed, but private copying levies tend to be adopted alongside specific exceptions for certain cases of private copying in the copyright law of the jurisdiction adopting them (e.g., in the US, those in the Audio Home Recording Act.)
Right, what I meant is that private copying is allowed because these levies exist -- but the fact that they exist only allows you to make private copies, not (as was stated) download anything.
Back in another life (videography), I had acquaintances who would throw looks when they heard I’d purchased a single terabyte.
Seems that narrative might already be - at least mildly -pervasive.
I'm always disappointed that the geometric growth in spinning magnet disks slowed - if the growth curve from the '80s to 2010 had continued to today we'd have petabyte HDDs now.
I've been downloading YouTube videos for the past few years. Not randomly, from specific channels I select. Today I passed 12100 videos.
It's getting harder. YouTube keeps making yt-dlp work worse. (And I started when it was youtube-dl!) I limit my downloader script to no more than 2 videos at a time, every 3 hours, hopefully in order not to trip any rate limits. All good so far.
This is really important. It's time to take history into our own hands given the penchant for erasure by the elites and how dumb the elites have become.
What do people think about email as an ever-lasting censorship resistant protocol? It's federated and encrypted at source (in some cases - see Protonmail, etc). I can run my own email server on my own domain, so for example I could have my news letter be an email subscription. Any attempt to censor me would require blocking my domain and/or blocking my email server - both of which could be moving targets.
I've always thought email is under-utilized as a distributed, censorship-resistant technology.
If you don’t use rss, just say you don’t use rss. I assure you that many of us do. It continues to deliver me hundreds of articles from dozens of sources day after day, decade after decade. my services that check rss, continue to run their automated tasks. It’s an amazing protocol and even when big corpos try and take it away, hacks come up to restore access.
> As others have stated, plenty of websites have RSS feeds.
It’s a bit of a mixed bag though - whilst some big websites still have an RSS feed, you can’t get the full article text, smaller blogs etc seem to be better in that regard.
RSS is alive and well. I use it daily with dozens of sites and authors. It's incredibly useful, widely used, and well supported.
Finding content is the issue. Unless I go directly to each site every day and scan for new articles I'm likely to miss them. If not for aggregators and RSS how else would this be accomplished?
> [RSS] is a standard that websites and podcasts can use to offer a feed of content to their users, one easily understood by lots of different computer programs. Today, though RSS continues to power many applications on the web, it has become, for most people, an obscure technology.
arguing that RSS is dead because the average person doesn't understand it is like saying HTTP's dead for the same reason. neither are dead: we've just abstracted them to the point that they're no longer the front-facing part of any interaction.
I think about the same. Right now we are at the normalizing the ID verification stage and banning specific content in certain countries/states, once we are desensitized, VPNs will come next, and then some government solution to track everything you do online.
They can go after hostings as well and everybody can take down a lot of things out of fear.
This has been brewing for years. The international network will not survive multiple independent governments all attempting to impose their own laws on it. It's bound to fracture into several regional networks with heavy filtering at the borders.
I am glad to have known the true internet before its demise. Truly one of the wonders of humanity.
The Internet was philosophically designed to move information, and for every effort to prevent that there is a workaround. There will always be a free protocol.
Same as market; anything that does not use it will use less efficient alternatives like politics. Sadly market like tao and politics has no moral either.
And notice it’s not being destroyed by the (largely fantastical) “fascist threats” constantly being whined about; rather, this is all the direct act of a decidedly left-wing government. Shocking to no one who has even a passing familiarity with the history of the 20th century…
It's almost like an uneducated public is easier to control..
Praise anti-intellectualism, change the media landscape so that everything is either consumed through short bursts of dopamine or presented in a way to manipulate you, and you'll have a society of people who are driven by their emotions with a very short memory.
As for the UK OSA, I think people are waking up to the fact that politicians will do what they want, use the enemy of the day to justify it, and group you in with that enemy if you oppose them, but I'm afraid without significant change to the system that this will continue to occur.
> This is not an ask from or concern of the general population.
It isn’t, but when asked in a “Do you support saving children?” way a lot of people do support it. You might say that’s idiotic, and you’re right, but any campaign to reverse this stuff has to reckon with it.
Anyone who asks that is arguing in bad faith and using children as political weapons to achieve their ends. It's gotten to the point I outright dismiss anything the politicians say the second I hear the words "children" and "terrorists".
It is more a long the lines that large document leaks have allowed people to see how NGOs have become vehicles for State Intelligence and corporate/political power.
It depends what you consider a “serious NGO,” but the NSPCC, the Molly Rose Foundation, the Breck Foundation, the End Violence Against Women Coalition, and other NGOs actively campaigned for and supported it.
There are a lot of extra steps the UK government can take beyond the fines:
> In the most extreme cases, with the agreement of the courts, Ofcom will be able to require payment providers, advertisers and internet service providers to stop working with a site, preventing it from generating money or being accessed from the UK.
They’ve done this before (various piracy websites are blocked by ISPs).
The criminal liability of senior managers could cause travel headaches too.
Unfortunately the government is winning, Apple’s ADP encryption is no longer available in the UK. The Online Safety Act was finally forced through after over 10 years.
They’ll eventually get what they want in any case the same way a chisel can eventually dig through a mountain.
Well-paced article. The exposition sounds bleak, but then Betteridge's law creeps up slowly over the middle of the article, and the piece crescendos toward a final showdown.
>a stand-off has been engineered between UK censorship measures nobody asked for, and the constitutional rights of all Americans.
This is probably my favorite line in the entire piece. Some heads up in the UK Bureaucracy created this regulation out of the desire to protect children, and now they are being pitted against the constitutional rights of United States citizens.
Truly incredible work from the UK government. I imagine the United States will not be happy..
>Some heads up in the UK Bureaucracy created this regulation out of the desire to protect children
More likely: Ofcom is seeing traditional media dying, so the bureaucrats needed to come up with something to remain relevant and employed.
Ofcom is supposed to be funded by fees charged to the companies that it regulates. There are no hints of social media having to pay them yet, but in the future?
Think of all the work that OSA is creating: age verification companies, regulation compliance consultants, certifications, etc.
Once private companies in the US figure out how much profit they can make off this, they surely will follow..
The new ban is easily bypassed even without a VPN. The government is trying to block cracks in a dam with their fingers. Assuming they even care about results rather than performative posturing.
You'll only be able to connect to domains that have been bought with a state-issued ID and digitally signed. If you run afoul of the rules, you'll be taken down, fined, or worse.
The means to publish and consume will be taken from us.
"Trusted" computing. "You wouldn't download a car." "Think of the children". "Free speech allows hate."
Within a generation of complete and total control of communications, we will be slaves. Powerless, impotent, unable to organize, disposable fodder.
You don't connect to domains, you connect to IPs. You can resolve a domain to an IP however you want.
The convention is use DNS and DNS providers play by some rules, but if enough people start to dislike the rules you will start seeing unsanctioned DNS services and the like.
I've recently had a glimpse of that - buying my first .no domain required me to be registered on the Norwegian population register, and full digital verification. There was even a phone call with the registrar! Some of the other rules are bonkers too [1]:
- Each private individual may at any time subscribe to up to 5 domain names directly under .no
- Each organisation may at any time subscribe to up to 100 domain names directly under .no
That's the best case scenario. Honestly we'll be lucky if we can even run "unauthorized" software that hasn't been digitally signed by the government on our own computers. Everything the word "hacker" ever stood for is coming to an end.
I'm largely in line with where a lot of the comments under these political posts are coming from, but there's no discussion in them. It's rhetoric, outrage, and oversimplifying things.
The comments on HN are worth reading precisely because of the discussions, so I'm not sure what the point of political posts are if that fails.
In general I agree, but I think this is one of those cases where theres no oversimplifying, it really is just what you see on its face.
A UK bureaucracy is threatening fundamental and constitutional rights of an American. Its so outrageous, I really dont think there's any nuanced discussion to be had.
Even worse than blocking certain sites, would be if they burden everybody in a mountain of paperwork, making a lot of internet endaveours no longer feasible. I'm not sure how they do it in China, I know there is an internet registration number, not sure if they have paperwork, e.g. to demonstrate that your site is compliant. Let's hope they come to their senses!
I look forward to the current us admin forcing the uk to very publicly walk this back. Their motivation will have nothing to do with defending free speech, but an enemy of my enemy IS my friend.
If the limitations on conducting A/B tests on people under 13 are enforced, you will need a driver's license to connect to the internet, and you will need to show it to every website.
Surely a state ID is enough, right? I know at least 3 legal adults in my circles alone without a driver's license, though I believe they all have either a state ID or permit. (Not that I support requiring any sort of meatspace identification for acting in cyberspace).
What the summary leaves out is that elements of it like 'harm to minors' have loopholes you could drive a truck through. It's designed to allow arbitrary censorship of wrongthink with 'think of the children' as cover.
>> I look forward to the current us admin forcing the uk to very publicly walk this back
He'll need to start first with taking action at home. Florida and I believe Texas have also implemented age restrictions for various websites and did so before the UK.
The most insane thing about this headline is that implies parents are giving their children devices with unfiltered access to the Internet and then the government needs to play wack-a-mole with every single website they come across to prevent children from accessing it.
Parents are absolutely giving children devices with unfiltered internet access. I think people here need to step out of their ivory tower. I would say most people don't even know to think about the things people here think about. "Unknowns unknowns", if you will. We all agree here that this is a bad idea. What percentage of the worlds population do you think reads Hacker News?
If you're going to say that, I think most people wouldn't even access websites to begin with. They spend most of their time on Youtube, Instagram, and TikTok.
I know people who don't know how to use Google because they only use a smartphone to browse scroll Instagram and Facebook. They're never going to access a website.
I don't know about iOS, but on Android I have access to Family Link which means I can control what apps my kids can run off the app store, and I can control whether they can access explicit websites (according to google) or have free access. I know other parents that are well aware of this tool, but they have to make sure those phones or tablets are signed into with accounts they have ownership of. I think this is the direction that the government should be pushing for and making sure apple google and microsoft are all playing nicely to allow parents to manage devices under the family.
iOS is similar. You can also limit apps/books/movies/etc. by content age rating, block adult sites, etc. without parental approval (which just happens over messages).
There is even an on-device image classifier for images/video to blur pornography from messages and keep them from sending it to others.
who wouldn't want the gov banning workers organizing collective action online? can you think of the damage to children if they mistake it for a Minecraft server? do you want to be responsible for that?
Have you ever opened 4chan? There are literally 3 threads right now with "drawn images" illegal in many countries. To me it's crazy it's still open. Early 4chan had the worst kind of images you could think of.
4chan is not in the UK and ofcom has no jurisdiction. This would be like Singapore trying to prosecute you for smoking marijuana in your own home in the U.S.
Being mean, for varying degrees of "mean", is actually illegal in most countries that aren't the USA and surely 4chan passes the threshold in at least some of them.
However you really need to name your MP. These political public figures need named and shamed for using binary fallacious logic like that. And barring listening to constituents, get rid of them.
If you're an engineer, contribute to technologies that take power away from those who lord over you. Which in this case would be distributed, censorship-resistant communication technologies. There's a lot of work to be done, not only in hard engineering, but also in things like UI and marketing, as widespread adoption is the best way to maximise the chance of success. For all its flaws, cryptocurrency (in particular anonymous ones like Monero) is a demonstration that this is possible: no government desires for its citizens to have a means to transact large sums anonymously online, yet Monero still exists. And as governments impose more restrictions on the internet, there'll be more and more demand for means to bypass those restrictions.
By all means work on better privacy technology but censorship isn't a technology problem. It is a human problem. We cannot work around ignorance forever. We have to engage the system to affect real change.
Over the last few years, it's become ever more apparent to me that technology can't fix what's broken. Even as we invent more ways to bypass censorship it becomes more so that people have less to say that I might want to hear with those technologies. And it's not just an ideological thing either, because best I can tell there's plenty of that stuff for whichever way you lean. What I mean is that people write less, there's less for me to read. But they have plenty of hustlely Youtube videos of the sort I have no inclination to watch. Less journalism, but plenty of opinions/editorials (I have enough opinions of my own, thanks). Less music... the whole recording industry seems to have imploded.
We're not in danger of censorship so much as we're in danger of there no longer being anything for them to censor away from me. I don't think it's just me either, I know some of you are seeing the same things I am.
They represent their constituents - you are one of those. If the majority of their constituents support the legislation they're doing their job. Could you post their full response to you? Pretty shocking if they accused you of being a terrorist pedophile and worth making people aware of which MP this was!
More made up problems for a fundamentally inept government to solve because fixing real problems like a broken healthcare system is hard and not a guaranteed political win.
Thanks Starmer, you're a worthless turd and no different than your predecessor.
> Thanks Starmer, you're a worthless turd and no different than your predecessor.
It’s amusing/depressing that Labor in Australia is doing the same nonsense too. They’re not actually much better than their alternative, which is why they continually get voted out and kept out of power.
> They’re not actually much better than their alternative, which is why they continually get voted out and kept out of power.
Labor won the last two general elections though? And the alternative is currently in disarray.
I'm not going to argue that Labor Australia are doing god's work - particularly on health at the system seems to be in crisis and need a lot more funding. But the opposition are in total disarray and desperately trying every wedge-issue in the book in an attempt to ignite culture-wars style partisanship here, which is (thankfully) falling on barren soil.
I think it was an agenda years in the making. I saw the groundwork being laid for this in 2021 and it somehow survived a general election and an entirely new government with a different political alignment. Ive seen other laws like this. It was nothing to do with the politics or the politicians, it has to do with civil servants who are working with their own agenda. Just like yes prime minister.
We should have something that sets the TCP SYN bit in every packet (between participating hosts) so that it overloads surveillance systems.
Bittorrent letters aren't from a generic surveillance system - it's participating copyright holders downloading the files from you and then pressing charges for you sharing it to them.
I still can't believe the UK got suckered into the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act. All it took was like two years of making you vote every three months and you gave up your democracy.
You're not like the US. The US turns over a good portion of Congress every two years, and re-elects what is basically a active King every four. All you did was make sure that no one in government has to think about the public for a second, while they do what their backers and buddies ask, then retire in five years.
There's no way out of it. Starmer should try to get down to an <10% approval rating just to make the history books.
The fixed term act, as the other poster pointed out, was repealed in 2022
It was also a hilarious failure given that during the 11 short years it was active there were two two-year parliaments. It also didn't stop PMs being deposed from within, during that same period there were 5 different prime ministers.
So I think your read on it is a little exaggerated there.
The Online Safety Act was passed when the Tories were still in government.
Rolling that back essentially makes you a prime minister that believes children should have unfettered access to porn, self-harm material, gore, and that the outspoken parents of kids who've killed themselves after accessing this material shouldn't be listened to. At least, that's how the media (on all sides) would spin it. Not really a fight worth picking.
The way to fight it without coming off that way is by advocating for a form of age check that doesn't require personal information, which I haven't heard any really water-tight suggestions yet.
If their real interest was in protecting children, they'd make a free, publicly accessible age blocking system that parents could choose to opt into, that isn't thrust upon all citizens at once
> The way to fight it without coming off that way is by advocating for a form of age check that doesn't require personal information, which I haven't heard any really water-tight suggestions yet.
Given the spread of explicit "give us our pedo games" and "let kids watch porn" voices, I don't think there's any demand for a moderate solution.
And when the moderate solution is actively rejected for a very real problem, nobody has a right to complain when the problem eventually is addressed using extreme solutions.
He's not doing a very good job of anything. His main problem is he has very few fundamental beliefs. All he has is some vague left wing aligned principles which he allows others to advise him on and then selects whatever position will gain himself the most goodwill. Which is why his ministers can propose atrocious ideas and he will go along with them. It's not as if he has anything better to suggest.
The problem the majority of people have with this law is "I can't easily access my free porn anymore". The counter-argument is "child kills self"[1] because shitty tech companies can't control their thirst for money. Like I said, I don't agree with the legislation but it's not an easy argument to make.
In a world where you can cast your vote anonymously in the voting booth, it’s a dangerous game to piss off a large number of voters, even if they can’t admit publicly why. They will be reminded every day of that idiotic policy. Like cookie consent banners.
I think you’re correct and the person you’re replying to is correct too.
Voters aren’t all that rational. They could choose to vote against the person that blocked their access to porn but also choose to vote against the person who made porn available again because doing so puts children in danger or whatever the scaremongering line would be.
He says he's against the OSA but he's also funded by religious right nutters who think it's a great first step. So if/when he gets into power, don't expect anything better to replace it. Not that I would expect him to uphold a single promise: as I understand it, Reform doesn't even commit to a formal manifesto, anyway.
Farage is a moral-free scumbag who will be known in history as one of the architects of Britain's period of decline. The fact that he hasn't been held to account is one of the great scandals of our age.
I'm all about liberal freedom, but blocking 4chan would actually help society given how abused it is by counter-intelligence. There is bullshit spewed there constantly and no one should be subject to that trash in a functioning society.
I don't think you know what counter intelligence means. That'd just be a regular intelligence or government PR operation.
I don't use 4chan but that stuffs pretty easy to spot on Tiktok and reddit if you're paying attention. Conspiracy type stuff is rampant on those sites. Especially around elections or conflicts like wars.
Content moderation or censorship can be an equally dangerous vector for government influence campaigns as well.
Q anon was started by Chan's admin, some random guy living in South East Asia, and was embarrassingly amateur
You can be upset about the sort of content on 4chan. Most of the planet would agree. You don't need to frame it as something sophisticated because you don't like it and want it censored.
I don't think censorship is a good thing unless it's censoring concerted efforts to spread false information which reshape the political landscape. You are underselling the bullshit that you say "8chan admins" were responsible for. It's inexcusable.
I'm not upset about the content aside from it being a clear devious effort to spread lies and shift public opinion.
Stop framing it as something different. No one with a brain is buying it, and yes, we are pissed.
The game Alpha Centauri had the most hard hitting quote that I think applies now.
"As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny...Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master. Commissioner Pravin Lal, 'U.N. Declaration of Rights' "
As reality shows - there's no such thing as carte blanche free flow of information.
Certain crimes are usually cited as reasons to inhibit information transfer, and rightly so.
There are other instances where we are all happy to have information prevented from being transmitted -
- Fraud
- Libel/Slander
- Harassment
- Threats (of a violent physical nature usually)
And, of course
- Spam
But we all pretend that when we say "Free to share information" that it excludes those (and other) things... which means that.. it's not free to share information...
Edit: forgot to add things like (although maybe they can be included under the broad heading of 'fraud')
- Stolen Credit Card information
- Stolen Identification
The above acts either carry no intrinsic information content and/or very few people apart of free-speech absolutists would be OK with them. They’re not evocative of the controversy at hand, and I can’t find anyone defending them.
Perhaps more appropriate:
* Instructions for making an illegal firearm
* Unpopular political opinions
* Instructions for engaging in illicit speech without detection
* Silently standing still with head bowed and hands folded in public
* Using a VPN
* Holding a sign at a protest
There are probably many more examples like the above, which would engender a more nuanced discussion.
If they do it, I never want to hear any criticism of the great firewall of China from them ever again.
I read on twitter, can't find the exact link, a chinese content site operating in .sg for many years, survived multiple "internet purges" by China, got banned by UK authorities last month.
I remember reading posts a decade or two ago on either Linode's forums or some other place like LinuxQuestions in broken English about tunneling through firewalls with ssh from I assume Chinese people.
I've started seeing posts like that from British people now. Absolutely wild. So much for the birthplace of common law.
And there are ways to hide VPNs as bittorrent sharing. No matter what the blocking method, there is a counter tech ready for battle.
(Bitorrent encryption was largely a reaction to ISP shaping/blocking a couple decades ago.)
The UK is where the US is headed if we don't grow a pair and snap out of this weak autocrat worshiping phase we seem to find ourselves in. It could happen so easily here.
Let us be brutally honest: UK did not land where it is now because it is in a weak autocrat worshiping phase. It is in FULL-NANNY mode.
Partisanship being the highest civic value in the US guarantees that we will not break out of that phase but will instead usher it in fully with two mildly different flavors. Coke and Pepsi autocracy with each insisting the other tastes like sewage and their own is ambrosia.
And yet so many look for the government to solve society’s ills, as if the “wrong government” will never ever take control. Perhaps we should all do more things for ourselves, and advocate for more laws that restrict what the government is allowed to do
This is a silly take. As soon as an authoritarian government takes power they just strip away the protections put in place to prevent abuse. The answer to preventing the "wrong" government from taking power is to have a strong "right" government.
This is a silly take. The answer to preventing one branch of the federal government from abusing power is to strengthen the other branches, and to strengthen federalism itself. Both are enshrined in the constitution and are the largest checks on growing executive power? In effect “weakening” any one part of the government.
The UK doesn’t have Texas or California or New York.
Looking at the current US, that seems to work not at all. The checks on power is only effective if enforced, and as there is no effort to enforce separation of powers, there are no checks.
And how exactly having Texas or California or New York would solve this?
i.e, as long as the people in charge are the people I like, its fine!
These things can happen over time. They don't have to suddenly jump into place out of nowhere.
You have come to the central tension at the heart of democracy!
This. The antidote to authoritarianism is a mobilized and motivated populace.
Liberals (small l) have spent 200 years being afraid of the masses and mass revolts, instead being enamored with pieces of paper that are supposedly holding everything up and keeping the forces of authoritarian reaction at bay.
They don't.
Well, nobody would rally over a few blocked porn sites, would they now? I can already imagine the banners.
The main difference between democracies and secular autocracies isn't that they have a vastly different approach to run-of-the-mill moral vices, such as prostitution or porn. It's that democracies tolerate a much wider spectrum of political opinions in public discourse and don't kill or imprison people who try to start an opposition party.
I think we can agree that the UK is moving in the wrong direction without drawing parallels to a place where dissidents are disappeared, both off the internet and in real life.
Anti olympic posters got police raids. Plasticine action on your tshirt got arrests.
> Plasticine action on your tshirt got arrests.
And then released when the mistake came to light. Not 'disappeared'.
The whole mess around the proscribed group is awful and seems like a massive overreaction - sure, you do not mess with a country's defence infrastructure. But the appropriate thing to do is arrest those involved and charge them with specific crimes, not misuse anti-terror legislation.
But lets not pretend people are being taken off the streets and made to disappear as they do in autocratic nations.
What so especially ironic is the posters views comes from the narrative control the UK is so disparate to get control of.
Any notion that the UK is actually run by the people is nonsensical, the so called democracy is pure and utter theatre.
They have done it, and the west (over half the US states, the UK and Australia at a bare minimum) have entirely ceded any moral high ground regarding it.
Yeah we ceded it long ago in the US being reliant on child sweatshop labor for the lowest price possible and demanding allegiance to America but no obligation to provide each other any social welfare
Western countries had no morality before just a facade of one. Now that they are loosing economic power they are also loosing the ability to control the narrative.
This is beyond vague. What do you even mean by morality? And how is it better for non-western entity to allegedly control the narrative, except also using it for its own benefit, which would be immoral by definition?
'The West also does bad stuff' is not the same thing as 'China and the west are the same' or 'Russia and the west are the same'. That's a false equivalency. The west has a long tradition of respecting individual rights. You aren't going to get disappeared like you absolutely will in those places. Say what you will about the failings of the west, but there's a clear moral high ground there, even if that height is an inch tall.
Long tradition of respecting them so long as one is a white man.
Long history of trampling rights of white men too if a richer one wants their stuff.
Inch tall is generous. More like sheet of A4 paper.
Don't make up stuff learn your own history individual rights in the west have been by race, color, education, wealth or sexual orientation and easily forgotten when the individuals are not white.
What you must understand is that they do it because of a moral failing, whereas we do it because the situation requires it.
You're being sarcastic, right?
The UK is morally hollow by design.
Which apparently might be opening up significantly. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44994403
I really wonder if true
It's just a different version of the same thing. In chinas case, they aggressively locked down internet influence. In the wests case, they held off a bit and made up bullshit reasons like saving the children with age verification. I cant stand this version of the 'free' west where they promote totalitarian information control and demand real IDs. This is nazi shit.
No one likes hearing hypocrisy from politicians, but it's one of their most dominant traits. That is, if you ascribe normal ethics and morals to them. But politicians' are a different breed, and the sooner we understand that, the better.
They will say, and do, whatever they perceive as being the most politically expedient thing to do. The ones that took moral stances in the actual best interest of the populace usually suffered politically for that. The ones that side with power tend to keep their power. This is the folly of political systems in general short of tyrannies, dictatorships, and kingdoms. And now we are seeing how democracies can be stretched into the same quality of life as so-called "lesser" systems but people don't like hearing that argument because the alternative is made out to be so scary.
It's not so much that democracy is the problem, but that it's too easy to sway people when it's so easy for money and power to be leveraged to manufacture consent. So now it's the people electing their own tyrants who will enrich and entrench themselves and being grateful for the privilege to be used for that purpose.
steps down off of soap box and stops yelling at clouds
> No one likes hearing hypocrisy from politicians
Cambridge Analytica showed politicians in real time that on a population scale, hypocrisy doesn't make any difference. In fact people will bend themselves around to square the circle.
Politicians finally knowing for a demonstrable, data-backed, evidence-based fact that they can do basically whatever they want and keep their support as long as they just say they right things is what has brought us from 2016 to now.
Remember, half the population are under 100 IQ points.
And most general people I meet here in the USA are either heavily propagandized, extraordinarily dumb, or both.
We could be for "better and better, which is what the Chinese have been doing the last 50 years. Instead we've been at" fuck you I got mine haha", and "don't let THEM have anything".
Well, the out groups have sacrificed so they have no more. Now making the lower and middle and even upper middle class suffer is the name of the game.
Remember, as long as you can convince people that IQ is a valid metric, they’ll believe anything you say.
I’m quite sure they don’t see it as hypocrisy. China censors the internet because they want to control everything about their citizens lives. But us? Oh, we’re censoring the internet to protect the children.
> but it's one of their most dominant traits
Always has been. What has changed is they now have the power to force their constituency to live with their hypocrisy and lies. Any effort to challenge the "leader" results in claims that you are now a "terrorist."
The internet was supposed to empower the citizenry. It's been captured and is now a tool used to suppress them. So now we see leaders completely unchallenged when their darker habits are exposed.
> No one likes hearing hypocrisy from politicians
You’re clearly not paying attention to American politics.
"oh we're doing it to protect the children! China's firewall is meant to repress political information and democracy! See, very different!"
I’m gonna blow your mind. If it happens I’m going to loudly criticize both!
The free internet might be gone in the next decade. Probably time to buy a few hard drives and do some archiving. I don't just mean piracy. Articles, blogs, anything you find precious.
I suspect that in some places they might start requiring ID when purchasing large volumes of storage.
"Only a criminal would need 10 terabytes of storage!"
Something stupid like that.
It sounds just as unfair as including a levy on blank CDs paid to music copyright holders, regardless of how the CDs are used. But being unfair doesn't mean it can't happen in your country.
holy shit it's real
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy
Which then allows you to download without being sued because you already paid.
No, it doesn't. From that Wikipedia entry:
> A common misconception is that levies are compensation for illegal copying such as file sharing. This is incorrect, however, levies are only intended to compensate for private copying that is legally allowed in many jurisdictions. For example, uploading a purchased CD on to another personal device such as a laptop or MP3 player.
"Private copying" is generally allowed under copyright law -- except that under DMCA, it's only allowed if you're not circumventing DRM. So for example, you can legally make a private copy of a CD, but not a Blu-ray disc.
> "Private copying" is making private copies of is generally allowed under copyright law -
Private copying is not generally allowed, but private copying levies tend to be adopted alongside specific exceptions for certain cases of private copying in the copyright law of the jurisdiction adopting them (e.g., in the US, those in the Audio Home Recording Act.)
Right, what I meant is that private copying is allowed because these levies exist -- but the fact that they exist only allows you to make private copies, not (as was stated) download anything.
Wow
Back in another life (videography), I had acquaintances who would throw looks when they heard I’d purchased a single terabyte. Seems that narrative might already be - at least mildly -pervasive.
Thankfully streaming video games never took off, otherwise we couldn't really use that excuse.
I got casually questioned by the clerk in Berlin Mitte last month when buying 20x 20TB drives for cash.
“Industrial-scale piracy” is what I told him, truthfully. I think he thought I was joking.
Pretty soon it’ll only be hyperscalers or large enterprises that have data storage. You’ll have the 4TB max in your phone or laptop and that’ll be it.
I'm always disappointed that the geometric growth in spinning magnet disks slowed - if the growth curve from the '80s to 2010 had continued to today we'd have petabyte HDDs now.
I've been downloading YouTube videos for the past few years. Not randomly, from specific channels I select. Today I passed 12100 videos.
It's getting harder. YouTube keeps making yt-dlp work worse. (And I started when it was youtube-dl!) I limit my downloader script to no more than 2 videos at a time, every 3 hours, hopefully in order not to trip any rate limits. All good so far.
Isn’t an official downloading functionality part of their premium offering? If you’re a power user perhaps it’s worth just paying.
On mobile (iOS), it requires maintaining a subscription… and, once a month at least, internet connection.
This is really important. It's time to take history into our own hands given the penchant for erasure by the elites and how dumb the elites have become.
What do people think about email as an ever-lasting censorship resistant protocol? It's federated and encrypted at source (in some cases - see Protonmail, etc). I can run my own email server on my own domain, so for example I could have my news letter be an email subscription. Any attempt to censor me would require blocking my domain and/or blocking my email server - both of which could be moving targets.
I've always thought email is under-utilized as a distributed, censorship-resistant technology.
It's a good time to get an RSS reader and build some direct connections to your sources. They're coming for the "aggregators" next.
rss is dead. and aggregating won't be your main issue anyway.
If you don’t use rss, just say you don’t use rss. I assure you that many of us do. It continues to deliver me hundreds of articles from dozens of sources day after day, decade after decade. my services that check rss, continue to run their automated tasks. It’s an amazing protocol and even when big corpos try and take it away, hacks come up to restore access.
RSS is the technological backbone that enables the distribution and subscription of podcasts...which by the way is massive at the moment.
As others have stated, plenty of websites have RSS feeds.
That used to be the case few years ago. Now it seems that all popular podcasts are hidden inside commercial services such as Spotify.
Nope
Still get all of my podcasts via RSS. Several dozen.
> As others have stated, plenty of websites have RSS feeds.
It’s a bit of a mixed bag though - whilst some big websites still have an RSS feed, you can’t get the full article text, smaller blogs etc seem to be better in that regard.
There are RSS readers which can automatically download the full article text. I use Handy Reading on Android which can also do so on-demand.
Hmm ironically it's how I'm reading this rn
RSS is alive and well. I use it daily with dozens of sites and authors. It's incredibly useful, widely used, and well supported.
Finding content is the issue. Unless I go directly to each site every day and scan for new articles I'm likely to miss them. If not for aggregators and RSS how else would this be accomplished?
> RSS is alive and well
That's a stretch.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-rise-and-demise-of-rss/
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=r...
> [RSS] is a standard that websites and podcasts can use to offer a feed of content to their users, one easily understood by lots of different computer programs. Today, though RSS continues to power many applications on the web, it has become, for most people, an obscure technology.
arguing that RSS is dead because the average person doesn't understand it is like saying HTTP's dead for the same reason. neither are dead: we've just abstracted them to the point that they're no longer the front-facing part of any interaction.
The Conversation feeds say otherwise.
Most news sites have RSS feeds. Wordpress ships with an RSS feed.
And for sites that don't you can make your own feeds by selecting links on pages (such as how AP News doesn't have an RSS feed).
I think about the same. Right now we are at the normalizing the ID verification stage and banning specific content in certain countries/states, once we are desensitized, VPNs will come next, and then some government solution to track everything you do online.
They can go after hostings as well and everybody can take down a lot of things out of fear.
This has been brewing for years. The international network will not survive multiple independent governments all attempting to impose their own laws on it. It's bound to fracture into several regional networks with heavy filtering at the borders.
I am glad to have known the true internet before its demise. Truly one of the wonders of humanity.
That's my suspicion. An internet governed to the least common cultural and legal denominator will be bland, boring, and useless.
Bought some drives recently having come to the same conclusion. Future of the internet looks bleak.
The Internet was philosophically designed to move information, and for every effort to prevent that there is a workaround. There will always be a free protocol.
Can we count on ISPs not mucking with stuff at the transport layer? I feel like at some point the only way is to create new networks entirely.
Same as market; anything that does not use it will use less efficient alternatives like politics. Sadly market like tao and politics has no moral either.
And notice it’s not being destroyed by the (largely fantastical) “fascist threats” constantly being whined about; rather, this is all the direct act of a decidedly left-wing government. Shocking to no one who has even a passing familiarity with the history of the 20th century…
It's almost like an uneducated public is easier to control..
Praise anti-intellectualism, change the media landscape so that everything is either consumed through short bursts of dopamine or presented in a way to manipulate you, and you'll have a society of people who are driven by their emotions with a very short memory.
As for the UK OSA, I think people are waking up to the fact that politicians will do what they want, use the enemy of the day to justify it, and group you in with that enemy if you oppose them, but I'm afraid without significant change to the system that this will continue to occur.
Not at all according to booru admninistrators. They-re specifically pointing fingers at Russel Vought.
From my perspective, this is born out of NGO's and political elite. This is not an ask from or concern of the general population.
> This is not an ask from or concern of the general population.
It isn’t, but when asked in a “Do you support saving children?” way a lot of people do support it. You might say that’s idiotic, and you’re right, but any campaign to reverse this stuff has to reckon with it.
Ditto for "do you want more secure software?" It turns out people don't realise that also means making software secured against their will.
Every authoritarian regime relies on large numbers of useful idiots.
Anyone who asks that is arguing in bad faith and using children as political weapons to achieve their ends. It's gotten to the point I outright dismiss anything the politicians say the second I hear the words "children" and "terrorists".
Is it just me or is this demonizing of NGOs a very recent phenomenon trickling into the dialogue? I find it quite alarming.
"Non Government Organizations" that get (a lot of) public money and then get to use it in any clandestine way they feel like is worth demonizing.
It is more a long the lines that large document leaks have allowed people to see how NGOs have become vehicles for State Intelligence and corporate/political power.
And not corporate despite the lobbying?
Afaik not a single serious ngo support this.
It depends what you consider a “serious NGO,” but the NSPCC, the Molly Rose Foundation, the Breck Foundation, the End Violence Against Women Coalition, and other NGOs actively campaigned for and supported it.
Well sure, but no true NGO supports it.
Lobbying only does something if government is corrupt.
There are a lot of extra steps the UK government can take beyond the fines:
> In the most extreme cases, with the agreement of the courts, Ofcom will be able to require payment providers, advertisers and internet service providers to stop working with a site, preventing it from generating money or being accessed from the UK.
They’ve done this before (various piracy websites are blocked by ISPs).
The criminal liability of senior managers could cause travel headaches too.
OFCOM is powerless. ISP blocks are worthless.
This is going to fizzle out, like the Australian eSafety team trying to remove content off X globally.
Or get Apple to poke holes in it's crypto. Just not going to happen.
Unfortunately the government is winning, Apple’s ADP encryption is no longer available in the UK. The Online Safety Act was finally forced through after over 10 years.
They’ll eventually get what they want in any case the same way a chisel can eventually dig through a mountain.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdj2m3rrk74o
Yes, and it's not just the UK
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckg2kz9kn93o
True. Proposal not law mind.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/174...
Well-paced article. The exposition sounds bleak, but then Betteridge's law creeps up slowly over the middle of the article, and the piece crescendos toward a final showdown.
>a stand-off has been engineered between UK censorship measures nobody asked for, and the constitutional rights of all Americans.
This is probably my favorite line in the entire piece. Some heads up in the UK Bureaucracy created this regulation out of the desire to protect children, and now they are being pitted against the constitutional rights of United States citizens.
Truly incredible work from the UK government. I imagine the United States will not be happy..
>Some heads up in the UK Bureaucracy created this regulation out of the desire to protect children
More likely: Ofcom is seeing traditional media dying, so the bureaucrats needed to come up with something to remain relevant and employed.
Ofcom is supposed to be funded by fees charged to the companies that it regulates. There are no hints of social media having to pay them yet, but in the future?
Think of all the work that OSA is creating: age verification companies, regulation compliance consultants, certifications, etc.
Once private companies in the US figure out how much profit they can make off this, they surely will follow..
Related:
4chan will refuse to pay daily online safety fines, lawyer tells BBC
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44982681
The new ban is easily bypassed even without a VPN. The government is trying to block cracks in a dam with their fingers. Assuming they even care about results rather than performative posturing.
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/722903
529,454 signatures and counting
Ah yes, online petitions: doing absolutely nothing for 30 years.
Sure, 4chan is a cesspool, but what if I start a replacement? How does the UK block it? Do we end up with an allowlist only internet?
That's the thing, one day you won't be able to.
You'll only be able to connect to domains that have been bought with a state-issued ID and digitally signed. If you run afoul of the rules, you'll be taken down, fined, or worse.
The means to publish and consume will be taken from us.
"Trusted" computing. "You wouldn't download a car." "Think of the children". "Free speech allows hate."
Within a generation of complete and total control of communications, we will be slaves. Powerless, impotent, unable to organize, disposable fodder.
1984 is coming.
You don't connect to domains, you connect to IPs. You can resolve a domain to an IP however you want.
The convention is use DNS and DNS providers play by some rules, but if enough people start to dislike the rules you will start seeing unsanctioned DNS services and the like.
I've recently had a glimpse of that - buying my first .no domain required me to be registered on the Norwegian population register, and full digital verification. There was even a phone call with the registrar! Some of the other rules are bonkers too [1]:
- Each private individual may at any time subscribe to up to 5 domain names directly under .no
- Each organisation may at any time subscribe to up to 100 domain names directly under .no
[1]: https://www.norid.no/en/om-domenenavn/regelverk-for-no/
> Do we end up with an allowlist only internet?
That's the best case scenario. Honestly we'll be lucky if we can even run "unauthorized" software that hasn't been digitally signed by the government on our own computers. Everything the word "hacker" ever stood for is coming to an end.
I'm largely in line with where a lot of the comments under these political posts are coming from, but there's no discussion in them. It's rhetoric, outrage, and oversimplifying things.
The comments on HN are worth reading precisely because of the discussions, so I'm not sure what the point of political posts are if that fails.
In general I agree, but I think this is one of those cases where theres no oversimplifying, it really is just what you see on its face.
A UK bureaucracy is threatening fundamental and constitutional rights of an American. Its so outrageous, I really dont think there's any nuanced discussion to be had.
Even worse than blocking certain sites, would be if they burden everybody in a mountain of paperwork, making a lot of internet endaveours no longer feasible. I'm not sure how they do it in China, I know there is an internet registration number, not sure if they have paperwork, e.g. to demonstrate that your site is compliant. Let's hope they come to their senses!
I look forward to the current us admin forcing the uk to very publicly walk this back. Their motivation will have nothing to do with defending free speech, but an enemy of my enemy IS my friend.
S.1748 - Kids Online Safety Act[1] is working its way through and as I understand it has fairly broad support.
There may be significant differences between KOSA and OSA in their implementation but they are the same in essence.
[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/174...
KOSA is one of those bills that gets introduced in every session (sometimes under different names) without any chance of passing.
Honestly from the summary this seems pretty.. reasonable?
If the limitations on conducting A/B tests on people under 13 are enforced, you will need a driver's license to connect to the internet, and you will need to show it to every website.
Companies don't need A/B tests to tell them that requiring a driver's license is going to hurt conversions more than no more A/B tests.
Surely a state ID is enough, right? I know at least 3 legal adults in my circles alone without a driver's license, though I believe they all have either a state ID or permit. (Not that I support requiring any sort of meatspace identification for acting in cyberspace).
What the summary leaves out is that elements of it like 'harm to minors' have loopholes you could drive a truck through. It's designed to allow arbitrary censorship of wrongthink with 'think of the children' as cover.
>> I look forward to the current us admin forcing the uk to very publicly walk this back
He'll need to start first with taking action at home. Florida and I believe Texas have also implemented age restrictions for various websites and did so before the UK.
So maybe they're not your friend.
But the predator of your predator isn’t your protector, just a bigger predator.
The current US administration isn’t pro free speech, they just use other tools to prevent it.
UK uses laws, US uses money respectively the lack of money for you if your speech doesn’t suit them.
US free speech has a price tag.
> But the predator of your predator isn’t your protector, just a bigger predator.
That line sounds like the start of a counter to "Won't somebody think of the children."
The us is on a parallel track You will be underwhelmed.
You're joking right?
https://bsky.social/about/blog/08-22-2025-mississippi-hb1126
Mississpi is a pretty Republican state and has enacted even more stringent and privacy-invasive laws.
Mississippi is forcing wikipedia, 4chan, a ton of other sites to have ID uploads?
Given that web traffic to certain adult websites has dropped 90% from the UK, in waiting to hear news of the lawsuit.
What is the resultant increase in traffic from other countries I wonder? VPN endpoint traffic has to pop up somewhere.
The most insane thing about this headline is that implies parents are giving their children devices with unfiltered access to the Internet and then the government needs to play wack-a-mole with every single website they come across to prevent children from accessing it.
The most insane thing about western society is the tendency of a lot of the populace to abrogate all responsibility to the government.
Parents are absolutely giving children devices with unfiltered internet access. I think people here need to step out of their ivory tower. I would say most people don't even know to think about the things people here think about. "Unknowns unknowns", if you will. We all agree here that this is a bad idea. What percentage of the worlds population do you think reads Hacker News?
If you're going to say that, I think most people wouldn't even access websites to begin with. They spend most of their time on Youtube, Instagram, and TikTok.
I know people who don't know how to use Google because they only use a smartphone to browse scroll Instagram and Facebook. They're never going to access a website.
Large companies have dozens or hundreds (even thousands) of their own internal websites, plus tons of SaaS for HR, tax, benefits, etc.
People use "websites" all the fucking time.
I don't know about iOS, but on Android I have access to Family Link which means I can control what apps my kids can run off the app store, and I can control whether they can access explicit websites (according to google) or have free access. I know other parents that are well aware of this tool, but they have to make sure those phones or tablets are signed into with accounts they have ownership of. I think this is the direction that the government should be pushing for and making sure apple google and microsoft are all playing nicely to allow parents to manage devices under the family.
iOS is similar. You can also limit apps/books/movies/etc. by content age rating, block adult sites, etc. without parental approval (which just happens over messages).
There is even an on-device image classifier for images/video to blur pornography from messages and keep them from sending it to others.
who wouldn't want the gov banning workers organizing collective action online? can you think of the damage to children if they mistake it for a Minecraft server? do you want to be responsible for that?
4chan doesn't do anything illegal unless you think that being mean should be banned.
Have you ever opened 4chan? There are literally 3 threads right now with "drawn images" illegal in many countries. To me it's crazy it's still open. Early 4chan had the worst kind of images you could think of.
Well that depends on what laws are passed, doesn’t it? 4Chan is now in violation of a new UK law.
4chan is not in the UK and ofcom has no jurisdiction. This would be like Singapore trying to prosecute you for smoking marijuana in your own home in the U.S.
Being mean, for varying degrees of "mean", is actually illegal in most countries that aren't the USA and surely 4chan passes the threshold in at least some of them.
For someone who has never been there, sure. It’s hardly the worst *chan though and I’d argue KiwiFarms is less redeemable.
The only real difference is the size of the audience between them. It hasn't changed since its earliest days. Many of the users go between them.
i think so.
My local MP won’t do anything and basically dismissed me as a pedo/terrorist for even considering talking against the OSA.
What can be done if those who represent you, don’t?
That's just the way democracy works. What you have to do is convince your fellow voters. Do that and your MP will go along. Or be replaced.
Vouched.
However you really need to name your MP. These political public figures need named and shamed for using binary fallacious logic like that. And barring listening to constituents, get rid of them.
If you're an engineer, contribute to technologies that take power away from those who lord over you. Which in this case would be distributed, censorship-resistant communication technologies. There's a lot of work to be done, not only in hard engineering, but also in things like UI and marketing, as widespread adoption is the best way to maximise the chance of success. For all its flaws, cryptocurrency (in particular anonymous ones like Monero) is a demonstration that this is possible: no government desires for its citizens to have a means to transact large sums anonymously online, yet Monero still exists. And as governments impose more restrictions on the internet, there'll be more and more demand for means to bypass those restrictions.
By all means work on better privacy technology but censorship isn't a technology problem. It is a human problem. We cannot work around ignorance forever. We have to engage the system to affect real change.
Which specific projects in particular?
Over the last few years, it's become ever more apparent to me that technology can't fix what's broken. Even as we invent more ways to bypass censorship it becomes more so that people have less to say that I might want to hear with those technologies. And it's not just an ideological thing either, because best I can tell there's plenty of that stuff for whichever way you lean. What I mean is that people write less, there's less for me to read. But they have plenty of hustlely Youtube videos of the sort I have no inclination to watch. Less journalism, but plenty of opinions/editorials (I have enough opinions of my own, thanks). Less music... the whole recording industry seems to have imploded.
We're not in danger of censorship so much as we're in danger of there no longer being anything for them to censor away from me. I don't think it's just me either, I know some of you are seeing the same things I am.
There is not "less music".
There are more options than there have ever been to listen to music someone made around the world from you, even in real time.
They represent their constituents - you are one of those. If the majority of their constituents support the legislation they're doing their job. Could you post their full response to you? Pretty shocking if they accused you of being a terrorist pedophile and worth making people aware of which MP this was!
More made up problems for a fundamentally inept government to solve because fixing real problems like a broken healthcare system is hard and not a guaranteed political win.
Thanks Starmer, you're a worthless turd and no different than your predecessor.
> Thanks Starmer, you're a worthless turd and no different than your predecessor.
It’s amusing/depressing that Labor in Australia is doing the same nonsense too. They’re not actually much better than their alternative, which is why they continually get voted out and kept out of power.
> They’re not actually much better than their alternative, which is why they continually get voted out and kept out of power.
Labor won the last two general elections though? And the alternative is currently in disarray.
I'm not going to argue that Labor Australia are doing god's work - particularly on health at the system seems to be in crisis and need a lot more funding. But the opposition are in total disarray and desperately trying every wedge-issue in the book in an attempt to ignite culture-wars style partisanship here, which is (thankfully) falling on barren soil.
I think it was an agenda years in the making. I saw the groundwork being laid for this in 2021 and it somehow survived a general election and an entirely new government with a different political alignment. Ive seen other laws like this. It was nothing to do with the politics or the politicians, it has to do with civil servants who are working with their own agenda. Just like yes prime minister.
It's building on the Snoopers Charter 2016
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigatory_Powers_Act_201...
People seem to have forgotten that all major UK ISPs are now logging TCP connection metadata and all DNS queries
ISPs will send you warning letters if you're using bittorrent
We should have something that sets the TCP SYN bit in every packet (between participating hosts) so that it overloads surveillance systems.
Bittorrent letters aren't from a generic surveillance system - it's participating copyright holders downloading the files from you and then pressing charges for you sharing it to them.
I still can't believe the UK got suckered into the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act. All it took was like two years of making you vote every three months and you gave up your democracy.
You're not like the US. The US turns over a good portion of Congress every two years, and re-elects what is basically a active King every four. All you did was make sure that no one in government has to think about the public for a second, while they do what their backers and buddies ask, then retire in five years.
There's no way out of it. Starmer should try to get down to an <10% approval rating just to make the history books.
I can't quite tell whether you know this from the way you wrote your comment, but the Fixed-Term Parliaments act was repealed in 2022: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed-term_Parliaments_Act_201...
The fixed term act, as the other poster pointed out, was repealed in 2022
It was also a hilarious failure given that during the 11 short years it was active there were two two-year parliaments. It also didn't stop PMs being deposed from within, during that same period there were 5 different prime ministers.
So I think your read on it is a little exaggerated there.
The Online Safety Act was passed when the Tories were still in government.
Rolling that back essentially makes you a prime minister that believes children should have unfettered access to porn, self-harm material, gore, and that the outspoken parents of kids who've killed themselves after accessing this material shouldn't be listened to. At least, that's how the media (on all sides) would spin it. Not really a fight worth picking.
The way to fight it without coming off that way is by advocating for a form of age check that doesn't require personal information, which I haven't heard any really water-tight suggestions yet.
If their real interest was in protecting children, they'd make a free, publicly accessible age blocking system that parents could choose to opt into, that isn't thrust upon all citizens at once
>a form of age check that doesn't require personal information
But your age is personal information.
sure, but it's far from the most identifying information you can hand over to a government, though
> The way to fight it without coming off that way is by advocating for a form of age check that doesn't require personal information, which I haven't heard any really water-tight suggestions yet.
Given the spread of explicit "give us our pedo games" and "let kids watch porn" voices, I don't think there's any demand for a moderate solution.
And when the moderate solution is actively rejected for a very real problem, nobody has a right to complain when the problem eventually is addressed using extreme solutions.
Where are you hearing those voices?
That’s populist talk, and if the PM wants to play populism, he’s not doing a very good job of it.
He's not doing a very good job of anything. His main problem is he has very few fundamental beliefs. All he has is some vague left wing aligned principles which he allows others to advise him on and then selects whatever position will gain himself the most goodwill. Which is why his ministers can propose atrocious ideas and he will go along with them. It's not as if he has anything better to suggest.
The problem the majority of people have with this law is "I can't easily access my free porn anymore". The counter-argument is "child kills self"[1] because shitty tech companies can't control their thirst for money. Like I said, I don't agree with the legislation but it's not an easy argument to make.
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-62998484
In a world where you can cast your vote anonymously in the voting booth, it’s a dangerous game to piss off a large number of voters, even if they can’t admit publicly why. They will be reminded every day of that idiotic policy. Like cookie consent banners.
I think you’re correct and the person you’re replying to is correct too.
Voters aren’t all that rational. They could choose to vote against the person that blocked their access to porn but also choose to vote against the person who made porn available again because doing so puts children in danger or whatever the scaremongering line would be.
Nick Farage from Reform plans to pick this fight. Of course whether he does it or not will be seen.
He says he's against the OSA but he's also funded by religious right nutters who think it's a great first step. So if/when he gets into power, don't expect anything better to replace it. Not that I would expect him to uphold a single promise: as I understand it, Reform doesn't even commit to a formal manifesto, anyway.
Farage is a moral-free scumbag who will be known in history as one of the architects of Britain's period of decline. The fact that he hasn't been held to account is one of the great scandals of our age.
Unless he gets into power he’s just a symptom.
I like the fact that as soon as his cause 'won' he stepped down so that he didn't need to do any of the actual hard work in implementing the disaster.
People literally wanted this though.
Not a fight worth picking if truth, sanity, principles and integrity are worthless to you, I'm sure.
Just want to point out that none of those are guiding principles for politicians either.
I mean he has the same bosses right?
You mean the electorate ?
Maybe the Bavarian Illuminati.
I'm all about liberal freedom, but blocking 4chan would actually help society given how abused it is by counter-intelligence. There is bullshit spewed there constantly and no one should be subject to that trash in a functioning society.
I don't think you know what counter intelligence means. That'd just be a regular intelligence or government PR operation.
I don't use 4chan but that stuffs pretty easy to spot on Tiktok and reddit if you're paying attention. Conspiracy type stuff is rampant on those sites. Especially around elections or conflicts like wars.
Content moderation or censorship can be an equally dangerous vector for government influence campaigns as well.
I don't think you have a point, sorry. My post was correct. That forum is abused to create counter-factual q-anon type shit.
Q anon was started by Chan's admin, some random guy living in South East Asia, and was embarrassingly amateur
You can be upset about the sort of content on 4chan. Most of the planet would agree. You don't need to frame it as something sophisticated because you don't like it and want it censored.
I don't think censorship is a good thing unless it's censoring concerted efforts to spread false information which reshape the political landscape. You are underselling the bullshit that you say "8chan admins" were responsible for. It's inexcusable.
I'm not upset about the content aside from it being a clear devious effort to spread lies and shift public opinion.
Stop framing it as something different. No one with a brain is buying it, and yes, we are pissed.
You are the problem. I was very clear and do know what counter-intelligence is.
I think the world needs a 2007 /b/ right now
Worthless pool of idiocy.