Individualistic societies alienating child-parent relationships and reducing parents to sperm/egg/money donors are slowly starting to fall apart.
Do you know who's responsible to make sure children are safe online? Their parents. Not big tech, not the government, and not me by way of giving up my freedoms.
You argue against "individualist societies" but then blame "their parents" for not coping with the kinda impossible task of protecting their kids from big tech or the surveillance state.
It is a collective problem with collective solutions.
I'm against any kind of age verification legislation, but this is a really bad argument.
It doesn't answer the question of "what do we do about parents that don't do their job properly."
In theory, one could implement age verification by negligent parent imprisonment, in practice, I don't think that would work, and definitely not in all cases.
If we accept the premise that children having unfettered access to the internet is a bad thing (which, again, I don't think we should), there have to be multiple layers to it. Punishment is one, increasing friction and "making honest people honest" is another.
> It doesn't answer the question of "what do we do about parents that don't do their job properly."
Define “properly” and how often do the self-righteous themselves cause harm. I see a strong desire for people to want to “control” all outcomes on everything and have everyone in the world think and say and act as they want.
Yes but you see, my views are the correct ones and should be the only allowable views. Other people who want this are controlling and their evil views are simply wrong. If you don’t agree with me you’re a bad person.
These systems won’t work any better than identification requirements for alcohol and tobacco or anything else. Maybe you didn’t know anyone who drank or smoked when you were a teenager but they are pretty widespread even when parents aren’t negligent. Systems like the proposed ones will be even easier for kids to find a way around.
I’m somewhat in favour of these foolish attempts at control because they always drive innovation in technology to circumvent them and adoption of that technology creating a thriving underground scene. Content piracy and alternative platforms could use a resurgence and this is just the thing to get it jumpstarted.
This is the way! It is frightening how eagerly parents want to give up freedom for everyone, in return for not having to care about their offspring and the illusion of 100% safety.
I think the authoritarian trend accelerated during corona. Our western political nobility got a real taste for power, and they have not been able to free themselves from that afrodisiac ever since. Therefore chat control, 1, 2, 3, and when that didn't go as planned... lo and behold... age verification, and that of course needs control over vpn, and encryption, and there we go... chat control slipped in through the back door.
Soon we can no longer criticize china if this keeps up.
> It is frightening how eagerly parents want to give up freedom for everyone,
It's not like parents have much of a choice. When you gotta work 2 jobs to barely make rent and groceries, you need some sort of "safe space" to pawn your children off to.
huh? individualistic societies are the opposite. it's the commies who wish the parents to be mere providers of food and shelters while the education is done exclusively by the state. see, for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavlik_Morozov
How about this: nobody shall be unsafe online or offline, and the state shall guarantee it. That's a foundation you can build law on, instead of hoping every child got lucky with their parents.
I think North Korea is attempting to do this, for example by punishing not only the criminal but also their immediate family to a life-sentence in working camps, if the person commits severe enough crime.
I don't think it's as successful as it sounds on paper, from the comfort of our western society homes.
They probably should at least update it -- I don't think a government should recommend free VPN services. Too many of them are a form of botnet, malware, ddos, etc.
They never went away, just from your mind. Look at cheap xfinity wifi hotspots everywhere that still steal your credentials in the form of phone number and email address. The bar I went to last night has a free wifi hotspot like every establishment ever.
Misinformation smells like your own farts, disgusting to everyone but you.
Is the charitable reading of whatever’s going on in Europe right now that European states don’t believe they can hold American tech giants accountable to their laws? I genuinely don’t see why a law banning under-14 year olds from social media wouldn’t be the first step.
I think this is a genuinely difficult problem that happens to look exactly like what you’d need for extended surveillance. When I think about it seriously, I end up coming up with the idea of a whitelist enforced on device for local accounts used by children.
This would probably block most of the internet, and allow access only to sites that are validated as being safe. This would put a lot of pressure on sites and service providers to ensure safety, such as children-only walled gardens within their broader services.
We already have piecemeal attempts at something like this through on device private age restriction software, but it’s not organised at the state level, and I think it’s not effective enough as a result.
If legally enforced it could be made into a pretty effective system that would give adults freedom and anonymity and provide safety for children, while pushing the costs of child safety onto the platforms, which is where it belongs. If you want to cater to children, prove that you can make it on to the whitelist. Otherwise that’s an audience you’re just not able to access.
> the idea of a whitelist enforced on device for local accounts used by children
What’s wrong with making it the social media companies’ problem? If they sign up a child, they get fined. Everyone is then incentivized to come up with solutions. If some of those are shit, restrict them. If they’re not, great.
That don’t really work because this isn’t a nation state level enforced system, and realistically the only state that can force such a thing is the US. If they worked, we wouldn’t be here having this discussion.
... that don't need the identity of the parents to work.
Nor do these devices require the identity of non-parents who will never enable the childproofing mode
Nor does legislation invert the burden of proof and require the device's manufacturer obtain and store identity documents just to use the devices, otherwise it must restrict all access to a small handful of "kid safe" actions.
These aren't "child safety" laws, they're "adult anonymity eradication" laws
It assumes that people will fight for their freedom and insane measures will be needed to keep them in check.
So foolishly optimistic… people can’t wait to give freedom away if only they get a stable job and housing in exchange. Or if it hits these other guys they don’t like at the moment.
It’s all much, much less dramatic than Orwell. It is an ordinary, everyday erosion of your rights until one day you will realize that you lost something very important but it will be no longer possible to say it out loud.
One such example is China where all dissent was eliminated because people there prefer comfortable cage. Or Singapore. Seemingly majority doesn’t give a flying dick as long as government buys them.
Maybe the Orwellian times were different but it is what it is. It’s easier than ever to just buy people.
It actually asks hard questions and explores the tradeoff of an "utopian dystopia." In contrast to the society Orwell describes, where the government is cartoonishly evil, the one of "Brave New World" genuinely cares for the happiness of its subjects, and most of its subjects are genuinely happy, even if we disagree with the methods that it uses. This is by design; I read somewhere that Orwell wanted to position 1984 in explicit contract to Huxley, killing any debate on whether his described society was better or worse than the one the book was written in.
I think he heavily underestimated the human ability to ferret out the truth when the only thing the state gives them is lies. Even without access to reliable news sources, most people will at least realize that the news is lying to them. Even if they don't know what the truth is, they'll know that it's not what they're told it is.
I think the key to a working dystopia is to genuinely make people's lives pleasant. We care about the economics a lot more than we care about the politics. If you're a free democratic socialist republic and decrease people's monthly meat rations, citizens will riot and demand true democracy. If you are a democracy and the price of meat goes up due to the bird flu epidemic, people will riot and demand communism and wealth redistribution.
Nineteen Eighty-Four is a further rumination on how Joseph Stalin held power. It was meant to inform Orwell's fellow English socialists, who still dreamed of their own revolution, what the practical upshot of that would be. Stalin did not rule by people ceding their freedoms in exchange for comfort; they suffered intense hardship! Their land was taken from them, dwellings and vehicles allotted based on party loyalty and forced labour regardless of wage. But Stalin ruled through fear, within his party and without. His secret police looked everywhere for dissent and punished it severely. They bugged people, followed people, cultivated informers, asked children to inform on their parents, tried to instill loyalty to the state over and above their own family... they "disappeared" people (either shooting them or sending them to gulags), sometimes entire families. To send a message to any other potential rebels. And unsurprisingly, people wanted out. It was already illegal to leave the USSR without permission, the Berlin Wall was just the most prominent part of that. One of the reasons people stayed in the USSR was because even if they had a chance to escape, they knew the party would punish their family. This is the real world that Orwell amped up. The "memory hole" is code for Soviet censorship, which was rife - see the NKVD commissar vanish here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_images_in_the_So...
You're extremely naive about China. Do you think they wanted the Great Leap Forward and the Eliminate Sparrows campaign? One man's ill-informed policies caused a famine resulting in 15-55 million deaths. The One Child Policy? The state response to Tiananmen Square protests? The Great Firewall? The Social Credit system? Why does Foxconn have anti-suicide nets? You think industry tycoons being in bed with government is bad? It is! Now note that the theory of the Three Represents is part of the Chinese Constitution. Ask yourself why notionally independent Hong Kong imprisoned a large number of pro-democracy campaigners. These are not signs of a benevolent dictatorship. It's a totalitarian state maintaining its dominance over the masses and its elites revelling in the spoils. Why do you think there is such a push by rich Chinese to get their capital out of the country?
I don’t know what to think about China. I think I was brainwashed already. I spend too much time on Reddit where it seems they like China a lot and want to become China. (Is this AI generated?) Though none of them seems to be moving to China now that I think about it.
Look, it’s extremely hard to remain some kind of objective nowadays on the internet. I no longer know what is true and what is false.
Truth has lost all meaning and was replaced by politics.
Even history books written by scientists are routinely under attack.
In my country of Poland a Nobel prize winner someone that my teachers said was a hero suddenly became a villain. I never got my head around it. It still puzzles me. Like a some thorn in my side. He was a national hero? Now he is the bad guy? Why? It’s strange and unsettling.
I have seen some of the inside of this and it's not quite as clear cut.
One side of this is driven by a bunch of not too reputable think tanks behind the scenes who persuaded a couple of fringe academics to agree with them and push for it via the civil service. The government is taking bad, paid for advice. I don't know what the agenda is there but there is one and I reckon it's commercial. Probably a consortium of businesses wanting to create a market they can get into.
However the security services do not agree with the government or the think tanks and actually promote advice contrary to the regulators. They will ultimately win.
Attacking the regulators and revealing who is behind all this is what we should be doing.
However no matter what the government or security services want, they won't be able to stop people who want to use VPN or End to end encryption. Nothing would ever change in that regard.
VPNS need money to operate, and money businesses have anchors in the real, physical, brick-and-mortar world, which is ultimately under control of the British police, with their extendable batons and prison bars.
If you make money by laying asphalt on British streets and get paid in British pounds, there's no way for you to pay an internet business in Malta if the British government doesn't want you to. Sure, there's crypto, but crypto needs businesses which let it interface with the British banking system, which the UK government can instruct banks to shut down.
The real problem is that the legislation would bring the power to prosecute people who use them or use it against them.
The security services aren't having any of that shit because it puts their position at risk both from the front-facing side and recommendations and guidance issued and from their own operations.
The power to prosecute and the actual ability to prosecute are two different things. They currently can't prosecute CSAM offences nor piracy due to capacity. It won't happen.
I think VPN prosecution could happen if it was treated more like traffic offenses than like felonies.
Force ISPs to log all connections and make ISP customers accountable for their traffic, like they are in Germany for example. If you detect an IP to be used for a VPN, ask every ISP to disclose al customers who interacted with it and issue them a ticket. Three tickets and you're denied internet service for two years.
The problem is not with the state actually prosrcuting all, or even many vpn "offences". The problem is that the legislation gives states another powerful tool to prosecute people they find annoying but cannot easily punish for clearly breaking other laws.
Exactly, the effective purpose of overcriminalization is to provide a tool for selective use against “bad” people (those who get in the way). This includes recidivist criminals—though often only those who do damage to someone important—but it also includes counter-establishment activists, influencers, and supporters.
And also VPNs are tools to open doors in the minefield of legislations that they need to create to improve the incoming of some business, not of the people that voted for them.
This blog post is highlighting their specific contribution to the UK government's open consultation[1], not a general call for sanity. There's a link to their open letter at the end of the piece. No doubt they will write other authorities when the need arises.
It's worth pointing out that some people under some circumstances need to use VPNs. For example, timestamp.apple.com stalls when I call it from my machine, so I cannot sign any executables for macOS. When I use a VPN that changes my IP number, signing and notarizing works perfectly fine. My CI chain would literally not work without a VPN.
Actually with data fusion VPN does not fix privacy. Ad networks does data fusion of Javascript browser finger print. So you are de cloaked any way on a VPN
You absolutely should not be using the same browser for general browsing and VPN based browsing. Check out Mullvad Browser, based on Tor Browser but without Tor.
It should be possible for VPNs to only give UK customers UK exit nodes so that sites can still properly enforce the law. Same thing with having VPNs that ban explicit sites. It's not an all or nothing thing.
"privacy tools" doesn't sound strong enough. "tools to bypass censorship of the future fascist government" sound better, though longer
I always remember a video snippet of some meeting in US, some chinese looking woman says something like "Mao took our guns and killed us all, I'm never giving up my rifle". Some politician reminds her that they live in the democracy. She asks him something like "can you guarantee me that in 20 years it will still be a democracy", which he admits he can't
I've heard people on HN make the argument that a blanket ban is better because their kids won't feel it's unfair that only their family implements strict internet blocks
> Also - outside the HN bubble this stuff isn’t even unpopular.
This stuff wasn't unpopular on HN until it actually happened. Almost every submission on HN about social media had people calling for similar regulations or even outright bans. It was not until they actually started asking for IDs when HNers realized what they really wanted to achieve with these laws.
>There is a huge difference between supporting the regulation of algorithmic feeds and other dark patterns and a direct attack on personal privacy.
Normies don't see the difference and politicians don't want there to be a difference. Normies want security and politicians will offer it wrapped in surveilance.
I hear the UK regulator did want to respond but Mozilla office doesn't have a fax machine. So the grandpas in charge of regulating modern tech just took a nap instead
This is a fairly difficult problem. I think the internet should be for adults only, like many other things. But we've fucked up by giving children internet access and it's going to be hard to undo it. I think rather than fighting these measures we need to work on alternatives because keeping children off the internet is a good idea, we just need to implement it in a good way.
What about just banning phones for children? Could we ever make that work? It would be like cigarette bans except we now have 5 year olds addicted to tobacco and addict parents who don't want to make them go cold turkey.
Public libraries and schools can be used for genuine research purposes, but not addictive shit. And implemented ad blockers at the network level.
How old are you? I had the internet too but my homeland is already gone. Forums are empty, IRC channels quiet. It's just garbage run by adtech companies now.
Sexualization of teens is a thing. I personally blame social media together with showbusiness. But kids had access to the internet at the same time.
And the internet was slightly different than it's now. It had much more sharp edges that we learned how to live with.
But it also was much less predatory. World's smartest psychologists and programmers didn't work 80 hour weeks for small fortunes to make it as much addictive as possible.. if it was only that. It's also as triggering and depressing as possible, because distressed and depressed people are engaging more and can't stop.
What I mean to say is that you can't really draw an equal sign between internet we grew up with and the one we give (or choose to limit) to our children.
I don't mean we should block them, just that it's not the same.
We are fine. You're just falling for the "*this" generation is different" fallacy. Look up some history if you think previous generations had it all sorted until the nasty internet came along and corrupted us.
I'm not saying past generations were fine. Every generation having problems doesn't mean the most recent ones don't.
What makes problems into disasters is denying that there is a problem until it is too late.
Past generations mostly tried (with varying success) to fix the problems in their world. Sometimes the past generations' solutions are good, like much of the world mandating 40 hour work weeks and public pensions and workplace health and safety and so on; other times even when the problem is real, the solutions are worse, like the US experience with prohibition.
But when problems get ignored, you get stuff like leaded gasoline, cigarettes, and asbestos being everywhere, the Irish potato famine, the dissolution of the USSR, and the 2007 global financial crisis.
Even if AI doesn't do what it promises, the internet brings with it even more globalisation, cheap labour that undercuts any rich nation for jobs which can be done on a computer (which we've already seen examples of, not just with coding but also call centres). Even if Musk's promised about Optimus remain as unfulfilled as whichever version of full-self-driving just got made obsolete, a remote-controlled android does much the same for manual labour. And the internet does enable much weirder warfare: our governments can blame hacks on whoever they like, but there is often no dramatic photo of something burning as a result, just a diffuse degradation of economic performance from fully automated scams and blackmails.
And that's without any questions about demographic shift and who pays for the current generation's pensions when they retire, and if this has anything to do with free porn and the state of online dating apps. And without personalised propaganda. Without your home surveillance system (or robot vacuum cleaner) being turned against you by hacks only possible from cheap ubiquitous internet. Without any questions about if doomscrolling does or doesn't induce psychological problems, if sexual deepfakes are worse than schoolyard rumours, or if AI is sopping kids from learning as cheating is easier.
I would be one of those two generations. I dispute your point on two grounds: first, the internet today isn't what it was back then; secondly, I, and many of my peers, didn't turn out just fine.
Back then the internet was a wild west run by thousands of clever people. It was like living in a neighborhood full of people kind of like you. Nobody built it to be addictive or to cultivate attention. If you wanted something you searched for it. Nowadays everyone is on there and it's run by evil adtech companies. Kids these days are not having the experience we had back then.
It also didn't really do us much good. Already back then geeky types like me had somewhere to retreat to and we did. It took me years to learn real social skills and build a life off of the internet. When I see headlines like "Gen Z aren't having sex" I'm hardly surprised. They're not having sex because they're on the internet. What's more is nobody is learning to be an adult at all. People are in a adult bodies but still totally children at heart. They don't own anything, shun responsibility etc.
Individualistic societies alienating child-parent relationships and reducing parents to sperm/egg/money donors are slowly starting to fall apart.
Do you know who's responsible to make sure children are safe online? Their parents. Not big tech, not the government, and not me by way of giving up my freedoms.
You argue against "individualist societies" but then blame "their parents" for not coping with the kinda impossible task of protecting their kids from big tech or the surveillance state.
It is a collective problem with collective solutions.
I'm against any kind of age verification legislation, but this is a really bad argument.
It doesn't answer the question of "what do we do about parents that don't do their job properly."
In theory, one could implement age verification by negligent parent imprisonment, in practice, I don't think that would work, and definitely not in all cases.
If we accept the premise that children having unfettered access to the internet is a bad thing (which, again, I don't think we should), there have to be multiple layers to it. Punishment is one, increasing friction and "making honest people honest" is another.
“Properly” is the choice of the parent, except in some narrow cases we’ve defined culturally.
The last thing we need is society deciding in detail how children should be raised. CPS horror stories are bad enough as it is.
> It doesn't answer the question of "what do we do about parents that don't do their job properly."
Define “properly” and how often do the self-righteous themselves cause harm. I see a strong desire for people to want to “control” all outcomes on everything and have everyone in the world think and say and act as they want.
Yes but you see, my views are the correct ones and should be the only allowable views. Other people who want this are controlling and their evil views are simply wrong. If you don’t agree with me you’re a bad person.
These systems won’t work any better than identification requirements for alcohol and tobacco or anything else. Maybe you didn’t know anyone who drank or smoked when you were a teenager but they are pretty widespread even when parents aren’t negligent. Systems like the proposed ones will be even easier for kids to find a way around.
I’m somewhat in favour of these foolish attempts at control because they always drive innovation in technology to circumvent them and adoption of that technology creating a thriving underground scene. Content piracy and alternative platforms could use a resurgence and this is just the thing to get it jumpstarted.
We don't hold parents responsible for most neglect. Why is this special?
Does UK not have equivalent to CPS?
We do - https://learning.nspcc.org.uk/child-protection-system - but, at least in England, as with most governmental functions, it's been slashed to near death by years of austerity and "small government" lunacy.
Since it is fashionable tiktok subject nowadays, you do it like genx and boomers.
We turned out alright.
This is the way! It is frightening how eagerly parents want to give up freedom for everyone, in return for not having to care about their offspring and the illusion of 100% safety.
I think the authoritarian trend accelerated during corona. Our western political nobility got a real taste for power, and they have not been able to free themselves from that afrodisiac ever since. Therefore chat control, 1, 2, 3, and when that didn't go as planned... lo and behold... age verification, and that of course needs control over vpn, and encryption, and there we go... chat control slipped in through the back door.
Soon we can no longer criticize china if this keeps up.
> It is frightening how eagerly parents want to give up freedom for everyone,
It's not like parents have much of a choice. When you gotta work 2 jobs to barely make rent and groceries, you need some sort of "safe space" to pawn your children off to.
> It is frightening how eagerly parents want to give up
... every aspect of parenting.
> how eagerly parents want to give up freedom for everyone
...is there evidence that it's parents who are the constituency you describe?
Not to be to overly reductive, but you could use the same argument for drugs and weapons.
huh? individualistic societies are the opposite. it's the commies who wish the parents to be mere providers of food and shelters while the education is done exclusively by the state. see, for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavlik_Morozov
It's not about children. It's about re-introducing Stasi.
How about this: nobody shall be unsafe online or offline, and the state shall guarantee it. That's a foundation you can build law on, instead of hoping every child got lucky with their parents.
I think North Korea is attempting to do this, for example by punishing not only the criminal but also their immediate family to a life-sentence in working camps, if the person commits severe enough crime.
I don't think it's as successful as it sounds on paper, from the comfort of our western society homes.
you're describing a cage
Something I learned just recently—the Australian government (surprisingly!) actually recommends VPN usage, they even provide a bit of a guide and how to; https://beconnected.esafety.gov.au/topic-library/advanced-on...
The very same office of the eSafety commissioner that is enforcing age verification for social media.
https://www.esafety.gov.au/newsroom/blogs/social-media-minim...
Yes. Isn’t effective regulation of dangerous products wonderful.
That’s funny, I wonder if they might remove it since it is a common way for people to circumvent the ID requirement laws for certain sites.
They probably should at least update it -- I don't think a government should recommend free VPN services. Too many of them are a form of botnet, malware, ddos, etc.
And most people don't even need them any more. The days of free WiFi hotspots being able to easily steal your credentials are long gone.
They never went away, just from your mind. Look at cheap xfinity wifi hotspots everywhere that still steal your credentials in the form of phone number and email address. The bar I went to last night has a free wifi hotspot like every establishment ever.
Misinformation smells like your own farts, disgusting to everyone but you.
Main source of residential ip's you can "rent"?
Is the charitable reading of whatever’s going on in Europe right now that European states don’t believe they can hold American tech giants accountable to their laws? I genuinely don’t see why a law banning under-14 year olds from social media wouldn’t be the first step.
While their arguments are sound, Perhaps Mozilla should disclose in this document that they are also a VPN reseller.
I may be in the minority but I'm perfectly fine with Mozilla's approach here.
They link to the full document which lists their VPN subscriber count near the top of the about Mozilla section.
They also advocate for if not enforce HTTPS. Would this be bad if they were also a trusted CA selling signed TLS certs to companies?
This is the Mozilla foundation, the VPN seller is Mozilla corporation.
The foundation does get some of its funding from the corporation, though.
It would sound like an advertisement though, so in some way it’s better they don’t mention it
It’s better to hide conflicts of interest?
(Edit: I don’t disagree with Mozilla’s position, but failure to declare an obvious conflict of interest undermines their credibility.)
By your logic it's also better if Ray-Ban and Oakley don't publicly state that UV light is dangerous and that people should use sunglasses if outside.
That sounds silly.
I think this is a genuinely difficult problem that happens to look exactly like what you’d need for extended surveillance. When I think about it seriously, I end up coming up with the idea of a whitelist enforced on device for local accounts used by children.
This would probably block most of the internet, and allow access only to sites that are validated as being safe. This would put a lot of pressure on sites and service providers to ensure safety, such as children-only walled gardens within their broader services.
We already have piecemeal attempts at something like this through on device private age restriction software, but it’s not organised at the state level, and I think it’s not effective enough as a result.
If legally enforced it could be made into a pretty effective system that would give adults freedom and anonymity and provide safety for children, while pushing the costs of child safety onto the platforms, which is where it belongs. If you want to cater to children, prove that you can make it on to the whitelist. Otherwise that’s an audience you’re just not able to access.
> the idea of a whitelist enforced on device for local accounts used by children
What’s wrong with making it the social media companies’ problem? If they sign up a child, they get fined. Everyone is then incentivized to come up with solutions. If some of those are shit, restrict them. If they’re not, great.
Did you actually read the post that you’re replying to?
Yes. It goes off into the same on-device wilderness the lawmakers have wandered into.
There are already whitelisting solutions that can be installed on devices controlled by parents.
That don’t really work because this isn’t a nation state level enforced system, and realistically the only state that can force such a thing is the US. If they worked, we wouldn’t be here having this discussion.
... that don't need the identity of the parents to work.
Nor do these devices require the identity of non-parents who will never enable the childproofing mode
Nor does legislation invert the burden of proof and require the device's manufacturer obtain and store identity documents just to use the devices, otherwise it must restrict all access to a small handful of "kid safe" actions.
These aren't "child safety" laws, they're "adult anonymity eradication" laws
1984 was meant to be a warning, not the UK’s digital infrastructure roadmap
1984 is extremely naive.
It assumes that people will fight for their freedom and insane measures will be needed to keep them in check.
So foolishly optimistic… people can’t wait to give freedom away if only they get a stable job and housing in exchange. Or if it hits these other guys they don’t like at the moment.
It’s all much, much less dramatic than Orwell. It is an ordinary, everyday erosion of your rights until one day you will realize that you lost something very important but it will be no longer possible to say it out loud.
One such example is China where all dissent was eliminated because people there prefer comfortable cage. Or Singapore. Seemingly majority doesn’t give a flying dick as long as government buys them.
Maybe the Orwellian times were different but it is what it is. It’s easier than ever to just buy people.
Which is why I like "Brave new World" a lot more.
It actually asks hard questions and explores the tradeoff of an "utopian dystopia." In contrast to the society Orwell describes, where the government is cartoonishly evil, the one of "Brave New World" genuinely cares for the happiness of its subjects, and most of its subjects are genuinely happy, even if we disagree with the methods that it uses. This is by design; I read somewhere that Orwell wanted to position 1984 in explicit contract to Huxley, killing any debate on whether his described society was better or worse than the one the book was written in.
I think he heavily underestimated the human ability to ferret out the truth when the only thing the state gives them is lies. Even without access to reliable news sources, most people will at least realize that the news is lying to them. Even if they don't know what the truth is, they'll know that it's not what they're told it is.
I think the key to a working dystopia is to genuinely make people's lives pleasant. We care about the economics a lot more than we care about the politics. If you're a free democratic socialist republic and decrease people's monthly meat rations, citizens will riot and demand true democracy. If you are a democracy and the price of meat goes up due to the bird flu epidemic, people will riot and demand communism and wealth redistribution.
Nineteen Eighty-Four is a further rumination on how Joseph Stalin held power. It was meant to inform Orwell's fellow English socialists, who still dreamed of their own revolution, what the practical upshot of that would be. Stalin did not rule by people ceding their freedoms in exchange for comfort; they suffered intense hardship! Their land was taken from them, dwellings and vehicles allotted based on party loyalty and forced labour regardless of wage. But Stalin ruled through fear, within his party and without. His secret police looked everywhere for dissent and punished it severely. They bugged people, followed people, cultivated informers, asked children to inform on their parents, tried to instill loyalty to the state over and above their own family... they "disappeared" people (either shooting them or sending them to gulags), sometimes entire families. To send a message to any other potential rebels. And unsurprisingly, people wanted out. It was already illegal to leave the USSR without permission, the Berlin Wall was just the most prominent part of that. One of the reasons people stayed in the USSR was because even if they had a chance to escape, they knew the party would punish their family. This is the real world that Orwell amped up. The "memory hole" is code for Soviet censorship, which was rife - see the NKVD commissar vanish here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_images_in_the_So...
You're extremely naive about China. Do you think they wanted the Great Leap Forward and the Eliminate Sparrows campaign? One man's ill-informed policies caused a famine resulting in 15-55 million deaths. The One Child Policy? The state response to Tiananmen Square protests? The Great Firewall? The Social Credit system? Why does Foxconn have anti-suicide nets? You think industry tycoons being in bed with government is bad? It is! Now note that the theory of the Three Represents is part of the Chinese Constitution. Ask yourself why notionally independent Hong Kong imprisoned a large number of pro-democracy campaigners. These are not signs of a benevolent dictatorship. It's a totalitarian state maintaining its dominance over the masses and its elites revelling in the spoils. Why do you think there is such a push by rich Chinese to get their capital out of the country?
Perhaps you should read Brave New World instead?
I don’t know what to think about China. I think I was brainwashed already. I spend too much time on Reddit where it seems they like China a lot and want to become China. (Is this AI generated?) Though none of them seems to be moving to China now that I think about it.
Look, it’s extremely hard to remain some kind of objective nowadays on the internet. I no longer know what is true and what is false.
Truth has lost all meaning and was replaced by politics.
Even history books written by scientists are routinely under attack.
In my country of Poland a Nobel prize winner someone that my teachers said was a hero suddenly became a villain. I never got my head around it. It still puzzles me. Like a some thorn in my side. He was a national hero? Now he is the bad guy? Why? It’s strange and unsettling.
What an original thought.
https://www.google.com/search?q=1984+was+not+meant+to+be+an+...
Look at the images tab. This is so cliché there are hundreds of mugs and t-shirts with it!
Times would be tough if we could only express thoughts noone thought before.
> What an original thought.
Novel analysis here by IshKebab. :P
This take is doubleplus good
That's why the government wants to get rid of them.
I have seen some of the inside of this and it's not quite as clear cut.
One side of this is driven by a bunch of not too reputable think tanks behind the scenes who persuaded a couple of fringe academics to agree with them and push for it via the civil service. The government is taking bad, paid for advice. I don't know what the agenda is there but there is one and I reckon it's commercial. Probably a consortium of businesses wanting to create a market they can get into.
However the security services do not agree with the government or the think tanks and actually promote advice contrary to the regulators. They will ultimately win.
Attacking the regulators and revealing who is behind all this is what we should be doing.
> They will ultimately win.
Sorry, who will win?
This comment is a little unclear.
However no matter what the government or security services want, they won't be able to stop people who want to use VPN or End to end encryption. Nothing would ever change in that regard.
VPNS need money to operate, and money businesses have anchors in the real, physical, brick-and-mortar world, which is ultimately under control of the British police, with their extendable batons and prison bars.
If you make money by laying asphalt on British streets and get paid in British pounds, there's no way for you to pay an internet business in Malta if the British government doesn't want you to. Sure, there's crypto, but crypto needs businesses which let it interface with the British banking system, which the UK government can instruct banks to shut down.
The technology bit doesn't really matter though.
The real problem is that the legislation would bring the power to prosecute people who use them or use it against them.
The security services aren't having any of that shit because it puts their position at risk both from the front-facing side and recommendations and guidance issued and from their own operations.
The power to prosecute and the actual ability to prosecute are two different things. They currently can't prosecute CSAM offences nor piracy due to capacity. It won't happen.
I think VPN prosecution could happen if it was treated more like traffic offenses than like felonies.
Force ISPs to log all connections and make ISP customers accountable for their traffic, like they are in Germany for example. If you detect an IP to be used for a VPN, ask every ISP to disclose al customers who interacted with it and issue them a ticket. Three tickets and you're denied internet service for two years.
I think this would scare most people off.
The problem is not with the state actually prosrcuting all, or even many vpn "offences". The problem is that the legislation gives states another powerful tool to prosecute people they find annoying but cannot easily punish for clearly breaking other laws.
Exactly, the effective purpose of overcriminalization is to provide a tool for selective use against “bad” people (those who get in the way). This includes recidivist criminals—though often only those who do damage to someone important—but it also includes counter-establishment activists, influencers, and supporters.
Well true but wait until you do something else and they pile that on top of it.
Bullshit. GCHQ loves new ways to spy. Being able to harvest all traffic is their dream. I’m sure they already do harvest it all.
If they cared about privacy and security they wouldn’t be [redacted].
Their job is also to secure national infrastructure. Compromising that through policy would do more damage.
There has always been tension in this area. A prime example is Dual_EC_DRBG https://harvardnsj.org/2022/06/07/dueling-over-dual_ec_drgb-...
Oh definitely. There's two sides to the coin always.
And also VPNs are tools to open doors in the minefield of legislations that they need to create to improve the incoming of some business, not of the people that voted for them.
Interesting that they mention the UK but forget that the EU also wants to protect the kids by banning VPNs
This blog post is highlighting their specific contribution to the UK government's open consultation[1], not a general call for sanity. There's a link to their open letter at the end of the piece. No doubt they will write other authorities when the need arises.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/growing-up-in-th...
So your strategy when you are trying to change someones mind is to mention a lot of other people think like the mind you are trying to change?
Could you explain what is the theory behind that?
It's worth pointing out that some people under some circumstances need to use VPNs. For example, timestamp.apple.com stalls when I call it from my machine, so I cannot sign any executables for macOS. When I use a VPN that changes my IP number, signing and notarizing works perfectly fine. My CI chain would literally not work without a VPN.
Actually with data fusion VPN does not fix privacy. Ad networks does data fusion of Javascript browser finger print. So you are de cloaked any way on a VPN
You absolutely should not be using the same browser for general browsing and VPN based browsing. Check out Mullvad Browser, based on Tor Browser but without Tor.
most vpns block ads
not if the fingerprint code is coming from the first party server which is the case for most modern malware.
User to Mozilla: Cannot read your statement with a variant of your own browser because you have it "protected" by an internet gatekeeper.
It should be possible for VPNs to only give UK customers UK exit nodes so that sites can still properly enforce the law. Same thing with having VPNs that ban explicit sites. It's not an all or nothing thing.
Didn't people make kinda that huge and broad movement too terminate PIPA and SOPA?
Could you, my wonderful Western friends, do that again?
I mean, all of it is even on video and largely on YouTube.
> VPNs are essential privacy tools
Does Mozilla not understand that this is the exact reason why the UK wants to forbid them?
And that's also the reason why they introduced "age verification". It's not age verification, they couldn't care less about children.
Age verification is just mass surveillance under a fake name.
"privacy tools" doesn't sound strong enough. "tools to bypass censorship of the future fascist government" sound better, though longer
I always remember a video snippet of some meeting in US, some chinese looking woman says something like "Mao took our guns and killed us all, I'm never giving up my rifle". Some politician reminds her that they live in the democracy. She asks him something like "can you guarantee me that in 20 years it will still be a democracy", which he admits he can't
found the video https://www.reddit.com/r/GunMemes/comments/1c13kkz/survivor_...
UK regulators are just hearing another excuse for a loicense.
The UK government does whatever Meta tells them to do. We tax cigarettes because they’re bad for you. Let’s tax algorithmic news feeds.
And who tells Meta what to do?
They do what makes money, or what they think will make money.
UK is not and has never been a free society, UK elites have an authoritarian streak.
Historically they were fairly smart at doing it subtly but the mask slipped during Covid and they never really put it back on.
Also - outside the HN bubble this stuff isn’t even unpopular. Normies supported covid lockdowns and they don’t want their kids watching porn either.
The people yearn to be ruled and nannied
I've heard people on HN make the argument that a blanket ban is better because their kids won't feel it's unfair that only their family implements strict internet blocks
> Also - outside the HN bubble this stuff isn’t even unpopular.
This stuff wasn't unpopular on HN until it actually happened. Almost every submission on HN about social media had people calling for similar regulations or even outright bans. It was not until they actually started asking for IDs when HNers realized what they really wanted to achieve with these laws.
There is a huge difference between supporting the regulation of algorithmic feeds and other dark patterns and a direct attack on personal privacy.
>There is a huge difference between supporting the regulation of algorithmic feeds and other dark patterns and a direct attack on personal privacy.
Normies don't see the difference and politicians don't want there to be a difference. Normies want security and politicians will offer it wrapped in surveilance.
The UK gov needs to sod off with all this 1984 BS
I hear the UK regulator did want to respond but Mozilla office doesn't have a fax machine. So the grandpas in charge of regulating modern tech just took a nap instead
This is a fairly difficult problem. I think the internet should be for adults only, like many other things. But we've fucked up by giving children internet access and it's going to be hard to undo it. I think rather than fighting these measures we need to work on alternatives because keeping children off the internet is a good idea, we just need to implement it in a good way.
What about just banning phones for children? Could we ever make that work? It would be like cigarette bans except we now have 5 year olds addicted to tobacco and addict parents who don't want to make them go cold turkey.
Public libraries and schools can be used for genuine research purposes, but not addictive shit. And implemented ad blockers at the network level.
I had internet since I was a kid. By attacking the internet you are attacking my homeland.
How old are you? I had the internet too but my homeland is already gone. Forums are empty, IRC channels quiet. It's just garbage run by adtech companies now.
Or we could realize that there are already 2 generations that grew while having access to the internet and turned out perfectly fine?
Who knows?
Sexualization of teens is a thing. I personally blame social media together with showbusiness. But kids had access to the internet at the same time.
And the internet was slightly different than it's now. It had much more sharp edges that we learned how to live with.
But it also was much less predatory. World's smartest psychologists and programmers didn't work 80 hour weeks for small fortunes to make it as much addictive as possible.. if it was only that. It's also as triggering and depressing as possible, because distressed and depressed people are engaging more and can't stop.
What I mean to say is that you can't really draw an equal sign between internet we grew up with and the one we give (or choose to limit) to our children.
I don't mean we should block them, just that it's not the same.
We are many things, but "fine" isn't one of them.
How much the problems today are due to, rather than coincidental with, the internet, is a much more difficult thing to discern.
We are fine. You're just falling for the "*this" generation is different" fallacy. Look up some history if you think previous generations had it all sorted until the nasty internet came along and corrupted us.
I'm not saying past generations were fine. Every generation having problems doesn't mean the most recent ones don't.
What makes problems into disasters is denying that there is a problem until it is too late.
Past generations mostly tried (with varying success) to fix the problems in their world. Sometimes the past generations' solutions are good, like much of the world mandating 40 hour work weeks and public pensions and workplace health and safety and so on; other times even when the problem is real, the solutions are worse, like the US experience with prohibition.
But when problems get ignored, you get stuff like leaded gasoline, cigarettes, and asbestos being everywhere, the Irish potato famine, the dissolution of the USSR, and the 2007 global financial crisis.
Even if AI doesn't do what it promises, the internet brings with it even more globalisation, cheap labour that undercuts any rich nation for jobs which can be done on a computer (which we've already seen examples of, not just with coding but also call centres). Even if Musk's promised about Optimus remain as unfulfilled as whichever version of full-self-driving just got made obsolete, a remote-controlled android does much the same for manual labour. And the internet does enable much weirder warfare: our governments can blame hacks on whoever they like, but there is often no dramatic photo of something burning as a result, just a diffuse degradation of economic performance from fully automated scams and blackmails.
And that's without any questions about demographic shift and who pays for the current generation's pensions when they retire, and if this has anything to do with free porn and the state of online dating apps. And without personalised propaganda. Without your home surveillance system (or robot vacuum cleaner) being turned against you by hacks only possible from cheap ubiquitous internet. Without any questions about if doomscrolling does or doesn't induce psychological problems, if sexual deepfakes are worse than schoolyard rumours, or if AI is sopping kids from learning as cheating is easier.
I would be one of those two generations. I dispute your point on two grounds: first, the internet today isn't what it was back then; secondly, I, and many of my peers, didn't turn out just fine.
Back then the internet was a wild west run by thousands of clever people. It was like living in a neighborhood full of people kind of like you. Nobody built it to be addictive or to cultivate attention. If you wanted something you searched for it. Nowadays everyone is on there and it's run by evil adtech companies. Kids these days are not having the experience we had back then.
It also didn't really do us much good. Already back then geeky types like me had somewhere to retreat to and we did. It took me years to learn real social skills and build a life off of the internet. When I see headlines like "Gen Z aren't having sex" I'm hardly surprised. They're not having sex because they're on the internet. What's more is nobody is learning to be an adult at all. People are in a adult bodies but still totally children at heart. They don't own anything, shun responsibility etc.