Damn, U.K. is really getting destabilized fast. Law changes, immigration, censoring and now monitoring? Is this what happens when you leave EU and “lose” in the modern war?
I don’t understand how this is a controversial opinion, but maybe parents should actually parent their children instead of expecting the Internet or the government to decide what their kids should see for them? Maybe talk to your kid about safe and ethical sex, the dangers of porn addiction, and not to take anything away from pornographic content instead? Maybe we shouldn’t be giving children smartphones and tablets with unfettered internet access in the first place instead of spending time with them? Wild concepts I know.
because these laws aren’t about protecting children they’re about elimination of access to things the government doesn’t like… like queer spaces
This, right here. It’s like Nixon’s “war on drugs” that went on, and on, and on… The goal was not drugs, per-se, but to use drugs as a pretense to police people of color.
Drugs still won.
And people of color lost.
As is american tradition.
Thanks, drugs!
And giving them sweeping ability to track everybody via their identity papers, to see what websites and services they’re using, what all their online identities are, etc.
They claim the info isn’t being saved or passed on to the government to form a big surveillance database to one day use against people - sure, it’s legal to, say, be gay or a socialist or of a particular religion today, but societies and regimes change, and the info they collect on you today may become ammunition against you in 10, 20, 40 years time.
But I don’t for a moment believe their obvious lies.
This is nothing but authoritarian police state monitoring and control. It’s extremely obvious. Yet, who are we to vote for in the next election? Not Labour, thanks to this (and a few other big reasons perhaps), not the Tories because, well, you’ve seen what they’re like.
It’s not impossible for a third party to be elected of course, not as impossible as places like the USA that have a very worryingly solidified two party system, it’s just very unlikely.
Knowing the British people and their seeming apathy and poor judgement at scale these days I wouldn’t be surprised if they elect the racist bigots at Reform - who ironically would be even more authoritarian and evil than what we have now.
As usual, there’s no hope for the future and no possibility of good outcomes.
Humanity is doomed to repeat it’s failures for all of history again and again, and we’re just along for the miserable ride.
The general apathy and disdain for noncomformity (the hatred protestors get is absurd) really does let their government stomp all over them. IIRC BBC goes out of their way to not cover protests in their own back yard, or anything that may be critical of the crown
Not the government per se, but the powerful lobby groups that want a new world order. Usually linked to religion. Looking at you, Collective Shout.
Don’t give your children unrestricted acces to a smartphone until they’ve proven they can use it wisely. No smartphone before age twelve. Limited use until age 15. And ffs. Ban smartphones at school.
Teach your kids about the internet. It’s part of sexual education.
And don’t leave it up to private companies to identify me and collect sensitive data on me. Fuck that. If you really want age verification. Deliver the framework.
completely agree, if kids want a phone at school they can get a dumbphone
I’ve been saying this a couple places recently, but why not pass legislation requiring every site to provide a content rating. Then parents can choose if they want to restrict content by ratings or not. Yeah, you could have malicious actors, but it makes it easier and simpler for everyone to work than having ID laws.
But that would actually solve the problem and not enable massive government overreach. We can’t have that.
I imagine it would work about as well as YouTube Kids would.
Which is to say not at all
My 5 year old son does have access to an android tablet, but i restrict, selectively, what he can do on it and time limit his usage so it locks down after a few hours. I curate his youtube and frequently spend time watching kids content to decide if i want him watching it. If its good and educational i will share it to his kids youtube account. He cant browse the web, he cant buy things on the play stores. He has to get me to approve any app install and i will always install first and play to ensure it safe.
Its hard work, but its worth it to protect him online. And this has lead to it just being another one of his toys, it doesnt absorb his whole existence. He can take it or leave it. Which i am chuffed about.
When he is older and i can help him understand for himself how to be safe, i will help him however i can. Rather than restric, i will help him understand what the internet is, the good the bad and the ugly.
That requires effort, which most parents are unwilling to do, and newspapers will still want it banned and governments would still want to ban it so they can ban other things too.
This is a conservative idea if conservatives weren’t evil lmao. And I agree
Part of me wants every website to do this. The UK just gets blocked from majority of the internet then people in the UK can get angry and rebel.
The great firewall of starmer
So of all the fucking things to restrict, why this? Facebook is a hundred times more dangerous than any porn. Ban that shit instead.
Because it’s something where the current government can claim they’re “doing something” or “addressing a real problem” but it also doesn’t threaten the rich and powerful.
Going after Facebook would threaten the rich and powerful, for who it is an important tool for manipulating people, who think they can use it to mold culture to what they want it to be my breaking the minds of children.
The current UK government is desperate to say to the public that they’re governing and fixing problems, but they also really don’t want to piss off the rich and powerful.
because Facebook is an abstract danger, porn is (relatively) well defined
This is the second time in my life that Labour have gained power after a long Conservative tenure, only to dive straight into enacting policies that were more right-wing than their predecessors.
It’s less of a left - right thing (that’s mainly economics). It paternalism Vs liberty thing. Labour have always had a very strong “we must protect the populace” theme to their policies. Conservatives have it too, but they want to do it in a different way.
Sadly it’s a really difficult thing to stand against. Who wants to be labelled the person enabling paedophiles, when all you want is the right to private communication.
To be honest I don’t think much of this is about catching or preventing paedos, and is just straight up authoritarianism.
You’re right. It’s not, but that’s what you’re labelled when you stand against it.
It’s important to continue standing against it nonetheless, and not be intimidated out of action.
Meme photo of two astronauts in space, one holding a gun to back of the other’s head. It is overlayed with the text “Always has been.”
Part of that is allowing labels to be so powerful. Someone doesn’t have to watch kiddie porn or molest children to be branded a pedophile, but when you have that label for someone, it’s implied that’s what they did. We saw this same shit during the Bush years with the “terrorism” label. We’re actually seeing it again with Luigi Mangione and people protesting at Tesla dealerships. People don’t care about reality if there’s simple branding that wipes critical thinking away.
To correct one thing, the left-right political spectrum is based on authority. It goes back to the French Revolution, in which the nobility - favoring top-down power hierarchies - literally occupied the right side of the assembly hall while the revolutionaries - favoring true equality and egality - sat on the left.
This cannot be separated into distinct domains since power is wealth and wealth is power. The political compass fallacy is, and always was, nothing more than rightist propaganda to muddy language and ideology in an effort to hold on to their wealth and power.
Paternalism vs liberty. Tell me more. I haven’t heard of this comparison before.
The full spectrum is really more like “authoritarian vs libertarian”. Political policy should really be split into two different spectrums. On one spectrum, you have financial policy. On the other, you have social policy. The two normally get lumped together because politicians campaign on both simultaneously. But in reality, they’re two separate policies. So the political spectrum should look less like a single left/right line, and more like an X/Y graph with individual points for each person’s ideology. Something more like this:
On this graph, as you go farther left, the government has more ownership and provides more, (and individuals own less because the government provides more for their needs). As you go farther up the chart, social policy gets more authoritarian. So for example, something on the far right bottom corner would be the Cyberpunk 2077/The Outer Worlds end-stage capitalist where megacorps inevitably own everything and have their own private laws.
Once you separate the two policies into a graph (instead of just a left/right line) it becomes clear why “small government” doesn’t necessarily correspond to “fewer laws” when dealing with politicians.
I assume “Republican” on this diagram is not used in the contemporary American sense. Otherwise it would be somewhere up in that little grey cloud.
In any case, official US politics takes place entirely within the top right quadrant, and UK politics seems to have retreated there too. Canada is in danger of getting up there as well. And we don’t have any mechanism to vote our way out of that box, so change will have to come from action outside of electoral politics.
The precise location of individual points really depends on personal biases, but I agree that the “Republican” point is wrong on this chart; Pretty much all of America’s political discussion takes place on the right side of the graph.
I think it’s being used in the traditional sense, not the contemporary American sense.
How did neo-liberalism make it to the left?
I didn’t bother actually checking the individual points, because I was simply using it for illustrative purposes. The actual location of the points is largely up to interpretation, based on personal biases and viewpoints. For instance, plenty of .ml posters would likely object to calling Leninism highly authoritarian, or lumping it in with Maoism. But this particular compass does both of those.
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That’s a political compass, and it’s still missing several political axes.
I guess one potential axis would be ‘stagnation’, in the sense that social mobility between classes stops changing. That could be anything like straight up caste systems, or informal stratification from wealth getting locked up by the 1%. I hypothesize, that such an axis would be a measurement of how ‘elderly’ a society is becoming. When politics become too locked in due to unchanging political critters, the ability for a society to recognize and properly act in a situation becomes compromised.
My parent, they lost mental acuity and flexibility with the years, alongside their bodily agency, and have become quarrelsome. IMO, such dementia is what we are seeing in a aging America and the UK.
Realistically one can come up with any number of axes and still be wrong, because the domain of politics isn’t a metric space.
Around our local voting season there’s actually a online test to check which parties are more aligned with the person values and it puts things into a graph like this. It’s very useful
if i had a nickel for everytime a labour government came into power after a prolonged tory government and immediately started governing further right id have two nickels which isn’t a lot but it’s weird it happened twice in a row
Illusion of choice.
The OSA was brought in by the tories. Labour agree with it as well. Both of them are authoritarian bastards.
Don’t get me wrong, but why are matters of governmental surveillance and control inherently “right-wing” rather than a totalitarian policy not otherwise directly connected to wing politics? Extremists on both sides have a history of creating totalitarian, Big Brother states (which the UK is certainly headed towards).
Big Brother states (which the UK is certainly headed towards)
When the Snowden Revelations came out, the UK had even more civil society surveillance than the US.
As a consequence of those revelations, in the US some of the surveillance was walked back, whilst in the UK the Government just passed a law that retroactively made the whole thing legal, issued a bunch of D-Notices (the UK system of Press Censorship) to shut up the Press, got the Editor of the newspaper that brought it out in the UK (The Guardian) kicked out, and the Press there never talked about it again.
Also, let’s not forget the UK has the biggest number of surveillance cameras per-capita in the World.
Oh, and they have a special and separate Surveillance Tribunal (the Investigatory Powers Tribunal) were the lawyers for the side other than the State are not allowed to be present in certain sessions, see certain evidence or even get informed of the final judgement unless their side wins.
They easily have the most extreme regime of Civil Society Surveillance in Europe, and in the World are probably second only to the likes of North Korea and China.
Britain is well beyond merely “headed towards” Big Brother and has been for at least a decade.
Last i read, cameras in london outnumbered those in Beijing, so im not sure id even put them second place
It’s not so much the control aspect as the anti-porn stance. It also comes in at the same time as a series of anti-trans moves from them.
In the case of Labour, the party’s politics these days are over to the right on any measure. Under Starmer they seem to have abandoned their left-wing roots.
It’s yet another step in seeing the Internet becoming owned by big corporations. Only big corporations can implement these things.
Art, creativity, people doing internet things as a hobby, that is dying more and more everyday.
I miss the 90s internet :(
Me too, so much!
A big reason why I’ve come to like Lemmy communities so much is really because they give me some old internet feeling. It’s not super crowded, it’s an app that isn’t design for brain rot, it allows interesting online discussion etc.
I think projects like this can continue to exist, even in a bleak corporate owned internet.
There was a site I found in highschool around 1998 - the paradigm of pessimism.
Full of dark humor and anti-jokes, in glorious web 1.0 - that site had a huge impact on my humor. I’ve never been able to find it again. Just a random site someone hosted somewhere on the Internet - no scams, no paywalls, just a bunch of weird humor.
Nowadays, if there’s something you like online, remember to plug it into archive.org so it gets added to the wayback machine. You’ll still need to remember the URL to access it, but at least it will be archived somewhere
We also desperately need a non-US archive.
I tried gemini protocol for a bit to see if it did a decent job addressing this, but it doesn’t. We do legit need a ‘smallweb’ non-commercial sort of thing, but I suspect retreating to a BBS model is probably what is required.
I2p and the return of webrings. Done.
Webrings were one of the best ways to spend an evening. I loved getting lost in the Tolkien and Gardening ones.
It took like 2 minutes to download a single photo though.
I’d take that over the bullshit attacks the internet of today is attracting.
Perfect response. This gets the message across, “governments of the world, the Internet doesn’t need you, you need the Internet”.
That’s what everyone should be doing.
Have to agree with you. If every site just blocked the country with a stupid law like this, then the regular (regarded) folk that are gonna send over their ID the first chance they get will maybe log off their wank station and idk join the cause.
Saying that, at least ppl will be forced to use a vpn instead of sending their id through the internet if they dont comply and just block.
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There’s a UK Parliament petition to repeal the Online Safety act. There’s no guarantee it’ll do anything but might be worth a try for anyone in the UK.
Don’t forget to write to your MP - being polite but angry helps. Explain the issues, shortcomings and why you feel this should be repealed and a better user-friendly and privacy respecting alternative needs to be found BEFORE implementing stupid asinine knee-jerk legislation like this.
My poor MP is getting it in the jugular because they boasted about working in data security and I’m exploiting the hell out of that statement so they can’t easily weasel their way out of it.
I’m just waiting for the response to be something along the lines of… “According to existing law (see Online Safety Act), websites are required to do age verification… blah blah blah, no changes will be made, thank you for your inquiry”
Most likely, or maybe someone will try to use this to score some easy points with more online conscious voters. Probably not but one can dream.
Yeah, it’s a lot of admin for most small providers to be bothered with. Less of a hit to just block the whole UK.
Which is why big tech is actively lobbying for these laws because they know that they will be the only ones who can comply and therefore exist.
This is sadly the way to handle it, users of these places need to learn how to vpn instead of giving their private information for age verification online.
VPNs aren’t going to be a practical solution going forward. You are creating dependancies that governments can target, spying on traffic and enforcing censorship for these relays is something any country can and likely will implement at some point. The clearnet is dying because the evangelicals are killing it.
hand wringing over objectionable video games is why queer artists are now having their platforms removed. if you dont want to see certain kinds of fictional porn, then either avoid the website it is hosted on, or make an account and edit your blacklist. also, if youre worried about your children having access to gay yiff, then restrict their access
Fuck off with your device based verification system. That’s just the same service, but as a more invasive app installed on your phone.
Instead of scanning a face or ID and uploading it to a service, we’re expected to run unverified closed source code on the device we carry everywhere in our pockets?!
Fuck off with your device based verification system. That’s just the same service, but as a more invasive app installed on your phone.
not necessarily. you give a phone to your children. you partly lock it down by setting it up as a child account, with its age. you make sure to install a web browser that supports limiting access to age appropriate content according to the age set in the system, maybe taking a parent allowed whitelist. the website is legally obliged to set an appropriate age limit value in a standard HTTP header.
that way, the website does not know your age. the decision is on the web browser.
the web browser checks the configuration in the system, that only the parent can change. it does not send it anywhere, only does a yes/no decision. if the site is not ok, it’ll show a thing like when the connection is not secure or it was put on the safebrowsing list, except that you can’t skip it, only option is to request parent permission.
and finally the age is set in the operating system, without verifying its truthiness, but once again requesting lock screen authentication.
oh and app installs need parent approval for kid accounts, like it should almost always be.this way it’s as private as it can get. the only way a website can find out information about you from this, is to log if your browser loaded the html but not any other resources, because that means you were caught in the age filter. but that’s it.
there’s multiple pieces in this that is not yet implemented, but they should be possible with not too much work.
this is all possible with open source code, if you make sure the kid can’t install anything without parent approval. stores like fdroid could have some badge or something if a browser supports this kind of limitation.All of this is precluded by you using a browser that is authorised and approved by the government.
fuck any and all government that wants to limit what browsers we can use! the legislation should end at requiring websites to provide their classification in the headers. after that, it’s the parents job to set up the device properly.
This is kinda genius
All’s well until other countries try to implement this and you will very quickly see how nearly none of them agree with each other on which age limit goes where. In my opinion, the best way to ensure that children don’t go to certain places on the internet is to either not give them access to the internet at all or to only let them use whitelisted websites that you review yourself before adding.
how nearly none of them agree with each other on which age limit goes where.
that’s the task of the website to figure out, the device does not have to be aware of the laws. but I think is still much easier to manage than id verification.
I habe an other idea. don’t make the websites send agelimit http headers, because as you said that can easily vary by country. instead send http headers that tell what kind of content is available there. only the categories that could be questionable. that way the device (actually the browser) would decide if with the kid account’s age that kind of content is accessible.
that way the browsers need to know the age limits, and maybe it’s easier to handle it this way.In my opinion, the best way to ensure that children don’t go to certain places on the internet is to either not give them access to the internet at all or to only let them use whitelisted websites that you review yourself before adding.
ok, and I agree, but only very few parents will do that unfortunately. especially considering that their kids could be discriminated against by their
limitedclasates who don’t have their access so broadly limited.and then, you still need such a whitelisting capability, which I think does not really exist today in firefox and such browsers. addons cant solve this because they can be removed.
categories that could be questionable
That still could vary greatly by country and culture, as one man’s pornography could very well be another man’s art. You would either need a great deal of near-duplicate categories or just label something as explicit the moment a single country pipes up about a woman not concealing her hair or something else that doesn’t bother you one bit.
ok, and I agree, but only very few parents will do that unfortunately. especially considering that their kids could be discriminated against by their limited clasates who don’t have their access so broadly limited.
I suppose that we could at least be able to convince the parents that letting their children go unsupervised on the internet is like letting them go unsupervised in the big city. Totally fine if they’re old enough to know what they’re doing and don’t stray too far from where they’re meant to be going, but unacceptable if they’re not so wise yet and aren’t at least somewhat regularly checked up on. Children will always want the forbidden fruit, but their parents should restrain them until they understand why it was forbidden to them in the first place, and how to safely interact with it.
and then, you still need such a whitelisting capability, which I think does not really exist today in firefox and such browsers. addons cant solve this because they can be removed.
I’m not too well versed in this kind of software either, but I just looked up some parental controls services and they seem to offer device-level blocking of unwanted websites/apps/downloads/etc. Web browsers don’t need to do the blocking, as the parental controls probably refuse the connections to the web domains.
I didn’t even mention all of this being completely bypassed if you used another website as a kind of proxy: go to proxywebsite.com -> it has a search bar -> use it to go to explicitwebsite.com -> proxywebsite.com returns the html, css, js etc of explicitwebsite.com without you ever visiting it -> profit.
That still could vary greatly by country and culture, as one man’s pornography could very well be another man’s art. You would either need a great deal of near-duplicate categories or just label something as explicit the moment a single country pipes up about a woman not concealing her hair or something else that doesn’t bother you one bit.
that’s right. but I don’t think this system would be manageable for website owners if they wanted to comply with any and all countries laws. what if a country just bans any pictures about women? or something insensible like that.
since this system is only for child protection, and wont be able to barr adults from accessing sites, I think it makes sense if a website owner only wants to be compatible with countries that have sensible laws for this purpose. like banning child access to any kind of porn, gambling, and such. I think the PEGI rating system could be used for this, it’s been around for ages. but if a country has banned pictures that depict women in any way, they would just outright block that country, both because it would be very hard to deal with them anyways and because this is not supposed to be a censoring tool.I suppose that we could at least be able to convince the parents that letting their children go unsupervised on the internet is like letting them go unsupervised in the big city. Totally fine if they’re old enough to know what they’re doing and don’t stray too far from where they’re meant to be going, but unacceptable if they’re not so wise yet and aren’t at least somewhat regularly checked up on. Children will always want the forbidden fruit, but their parents should restrain them until they understand why it was forbidden to them in the first place, and how to safely interact with it.
that sounds good, and things like this should go in place of TV and youtube ads, but it’s very hard to reach so many parents without some kind of mandatory thing. and then, where I live I often enough see parents who have a baby stroller with a built-in fucking smart phone holder!! and guess what it is being used, the brainrot is flooding from them all the time. I guess that’s their approach to parenting even at home. it would be especially hard to convince these parents that this is bad.
Ah, I had been thinking that the parent would decide. But of course, how naive of me lol
Doesn’t need to be by age tbh- you could have content tags and filter by content instead of age (I.e. No graphic violence). That would ignore country discrepancies and then give more flexibility
Who said the device based service has to be closed source?
It doesn’t have to be, but the businesses making it claim it needs to be.
Experience, most proposal for “age and identity verification” being badly implemented mostly closed-source solutions that only works on devices they deem trusty, meaning (seemingly) non-rooted phones with specific OSes.
To be fair, this already applies to any baseband blob.
Oh no, what ever will I, resident of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, do.
Boots up Tor.
this will work until every country does this.
Trying to get every country to do something is like trying to herd cats.
basically every country that ‘“matters”’ implements some form of the DMCA
An copyright law is pretty similar in every country, or at least has a version of it. Japan’s copyright law is so strict you can’t even mention brands in media and has no version of fair use. It’s why in Anime, when illuding to trademarks, it’ll be something like “Sany” or “Destiny”. This however, does not mean that I, in Scotland, am forbidden from making a video where I mention the words “Sony”, “Disney”, “Greggs”, and “Tesco”. Every country has different copyright laws and on the internet they seem to take a middle ground.
Porn on the other hand is very different with very different laws and very different ideas. For example, Porn is illegal in South Korea. No “JAV” where genitals are blocked out, porn is straight up a crime. Where I live however, it is legal, albeit on the internet you have to go through an adult verification thing, which is easily bypassed. Each country does not have a universal standard law on pornography or what counts as such. There’s proposed laws in the US for example which could see the mention of queer people as counting as “pornography”. Not the depiction, just something like “Leonardo Da Vinci was gay”. That’s why people in the UK are worried because the law doesn’t just cover pornography and covers “sensitive content”, which, you know, could be defined at some point to include anything.
At this point Dark-web tech needs an upgrade, we might just need a “2nd internet”
i2p
That moment when you decide to use i2p because its more sustainable for every user to be a node just for your server’s location to get leaked in a vulnerability. This is why most deep web migration to i2p ended
Have any links or extra info on that?
i2p before 2.3.0 (Java) allows de-anonymizing the public IPv4 and IPv6 addresses of i2p hidden services (aka eepsites) via a correlation attack across the IPv4 and IPv6 addresses that occurs when a tunneled, replayed message has a behavior discrepancy (it may be dropped, or may result in a Wrong Destination response). https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2023-36325
I don’t really have a link, but you might be able to find something talking about game server protocols. Outside of LAN, usually you’re either connecting to a central server, or a peer relay. With a relay server it’s just a proxy between you and the other players to hide your IP from others.
There’s plenty of cases in games that didn’t do this where malicious actors could find the IPs of the people they’re playing with and DDoS them to give themselves an advantage. Knowing someone’s IP will also probably tell you extra info about them like what city they’re in, and open them up for further hacking.
I must have missed that. When did that happen? I used i2p a long time ago and it seemed very promising. I imagine it has got better since.
How about Gemini? https://geminiprotocol.net/
Gemini is a group of technologies similar to the ones that lie behind your familiar web browser. Using Gemini, you can explore an online collection of written documents which can link to other written documents. The main difference is that Gemini approaches this task with a strong philosophy of “keep it simple” and “less is enough”. This allows Gemini to simply sidestep, rather than try and probably fail to solve, many of the problems plaguing the modern web, which just seem to get worse and worse no matter how many browser add-ons or well meaning regulations get thrown at them.
How it applies to geolocation and server hosting in light of the OSA I really have no clue. But it’s an interesting underground hacker/tinker type alternative.
did this or the google ai thing came first?
This says it started in 2019, Google Gemini was 2023. It seems like these big companies pick a name first and then figure out who they’ll have to sue after.
Social/Political problems need social/political solutions, not technical solutions.
Hiding from the people oppressing you is pretty political
