Now we demand they give all their information and depending on the situation smile for the camera ...
I strongly agree with this. All these jurisdictions and politicians are passing laws that they don't understand the technical foundations for. Second order effects aren't being considered.
We should pay John Cheese to call them all personally.
They had to wheel McConnell in not long ago because he physically couldn’t walk.
And like I don’t mean to shit on the elderly (directly anyway) but I dunno just spitballing here, maybe we could get some folks in there who weren’t born yet when the civil rights act was passed???
This is the only correct response to such onerous legislation. Every site affected by such over-reach has a moral duty to do the same. Not that I expect them to do so.
Harder to implement than an IP ban for a state, though.
I think what bluesky did is the only way to fight these laws that all it will do is be a boon to people who obtain and sell PI.
For people in Mississippi, you can always get a VPN. You should avoid Free VPNs, but that is your decision.
Here's their write up on the Mississippi case: https://netchoice.org/netchoice-v-fitch-mississippi/
And obligatory Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetChoice
As I’ve argued on past threads about these laws: the internet was neither built nor intended for children. Nobody can get online without some adult intervention (paying for an ISP), and that’s the only age check that’s ever needed.
For everything else, it’s up to parents or guardians to implement filters, content controls, and blocks.
And there is nothing on Blue sky that is not appropriate for children over 13-with parental guidance.
They do need to keep the morons, and knuckle dragging lawyers off the platform simply because of their felonious actions and prison records.
I've heard that it's full of furry porn and worse. Is that not the case?
I certainly see less random pornographically-tinged content showing up in my day-to-day usage than I did when I was on twitter. The default view being literally only stuff I've explicitly followed does rather change that experience.
If the school curriculum aligned with their belief system, they won't be talking about a need for control
Does this make any sense or am I full of hot air?
No they wouldn’t. They don’t want anyone accessing materials they disagree with. Having such materials available on the internet feels like a threat to themselves and their children. They don’t care about collateral damage, they just want more control.
Corrupting ideas don’t exist. There is truly no such thing as an infohazard. We, as humans, are capable of making up our own minds about things and we don’t need to give this power of censorship over to people who are not acting in good faith.
Instead of honest religious conviction, I think the pearl clutching is the manifestation of the collective paranoia of weak men who are terrified that other men are looking at them the same way they look at women.
Ah yes, those monsters
In the sense that a phrase like "growing autonomy" doesn't really mean anything, sure they should get that. Practically, they shouldn't have a lot of autonomy. The concept of childhood education is largely predicated on the idea that children have no idea what is going on and someone else should be inculcating knowledge, values and beliefs in them while making long term decisions on their behalf. And there is a pretty good argument that those values and beliefs ought be aligned with their family.
Kids can’t sign contracts, I’m liable for damage caused by my kids, I go to jail if my kids skip too much school etc…
Some parents, finding themselves owning a child, decide to push the boundaries of what they get to do with their possessions to the point that it runs afoul of other laws against how humans treat one another.
You're correct that recently the most overbearing, authoritarian parenting styles have received a minor legal haircut, where the worst abuses must be done either in secret or not at all. The parents who feel victimized by this new norm would like things to go back to how they were when no one asked why their kids had so many bruises on their faces.
Pretending otherwise betrays an indifference to children’s actual welfare, and a disturbing form of motivated reasoning deeply concerning in its implications.
It wasn't until 1874 that child abuse was documented with Mary Ellen Wilson and then later that rights and protections were accorded children. Now it's true that foster care and congregate care existed before 1874. But it was Wilson who started the ball rolling.
More on Mary Ellen Wilson and child abuse, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Ellen_Wilson, and the history of child welfare, https://blogs.millersville.edu/musings/a-history-of-child-we....
If you were offended by my comment, perhaps it felt a little too close to home?
If you think they exist naturally, you're only looking at one of thousands of independent variables. If you average them out, we all tend towards mediocrity.
When someone appeals to hierarchies (e.g., "there's always a bigger fish"), they're just admitting to using a painfully one-dimensional worldview.
Have you considered finding middle ground and compromises? Or is war the only option?
You take a step towards him. He takes a step back.
"Let's meet in the middle" says the unjust man.
But then the books of the New Testament were written with themes like this:
“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
The New Testament tells slaves to obey their masters, and says women should remain silent and obey their husbands, and not have power over their husbands because the glory of women is childbirth.
The morality of the New Testament - the entire Bible, actually - is pretty vile by modern standards. Which is not meant to be an insult, because it was written thousands of years ago and morality necessarily evolves as societies become more complex. Expecting a modern view of gender equality or innate human equality from the time of the Roman Empire or the Bronze Age would be absurd, that just didn't exist.
But because Christians believe the Bible is the inerrant and absolute word of God, they have to justify the cognitive dissonance between modern morality and Biblical morality by pretending that either modern morality is sinful (eg accepting gays goes against God's design or a hundred years ago accepting equality between black and white people goes against God's design,) or the Bible was actually super progressive all along.
But modern morality is mostly an invention of the Enlightenment creating an alternate, secular model that even Christians eventually appropriated.
The idea that what folks say in public / online / amongst their friends is a lot different than what they think behind closed doors.
And from what I’ve heard it’s not that uncommon for kids to do something similar when parents take away their phones.
It’s easy to say that parents should just limit access and I think they should. I definitely plan to when my kids are old enough for this to be a problem.
But kids are under extreme peer pressure to be constantly online, and when a kid is willing to go to extreme lengths to get access, it can be nearly impossible to prevent it.
There’s also more to it than what parents should do. It’s about what parents are doing. If something is very hard to do most people won’t do it. As a society we all have to deal with the consequences of bad parenting.
We don’t know the consequences of kids having access to porn, but we have correlative studies that show they probably aren’t good.
I’m more concerned with social media than porn though. The correlation between social media use and the rise in teen suicide rates looks awfully suggestive.
Then why isn't that significantly regulated?
We also put limits on brick and mortar business to help parents. We don’t allow liquor stores to sell alcohol to kids. You could argue that parents should be the ones preventing their kids from buying alcohol, and requiring everyone to submit ID in order to prevent underage drinking is the state doing parent’s job for them.
This problem isn't specific to children. Addictive and often otherwise manipulative too feeds affect people of all ages. Instead of age checks, I'd much rather address this. A starting point for how to do this could be banning algorithmic feeds and having us go back to simple algorithms like independent forum websites with latest post first display order.
Here's the thing: kids are always going to be under peer pressure, and time and time again we keep falling for the pitfall trap of harming adults under the guise of protecting kids.
When it was the drug scare of the 80s, entire research about the harms of DARE's educational methods were ignored in favor of turning an entire generation of children into police informants on their parents. When it was HIV and STDs in the 90s, we harmed kids by pushing "Abstinence-only" narratives that all but ensured more adults would come down with STDs and HIV as adults due to a lack of suitable education (nevermind the reality that children are often vehicles for new information back into the household, which could've educated their own parents as to the new dangers of STDs if they'd been properly educated). In the 2000s, it was attempts to regulate violent video games instead of literal firearms, which has directly contributed to the mass shooting epidemic in the USA. And now we're turning back to porn again, with the same flawed reasoning.
It's almost like the entire point is to harm adults, not protect children.
It was harmful because it was ineffective as a mechanism to help Children not because of some nefarious motives against adults.
The same with abstinence only education. Virtually all of the harm was because it was an ineffective policy to help children, not because of some tiny second order effect on adults because children werent educating parents.
Video game regulation was primarily about adding ratings to games which again only harms adults insomuch as children are a big market so developers are less likely to make mature games.
2 of the 3 examples you gave were definitely ineffective at protecting children, but in terms of harming adults, the effects were so minuscule that if that was the goal, the supporters failed severely.
As far as age checks. We have age checks for brick and mortar stores I’m fine with age checks for websites. You also can’t display pornography in public for kids to see.
There’s nothing about “but it’s on the internet” that makes me think it’s inherently ok to treat it differently.
I think there are probably better ways to do it than this Mississippi law, and a law in a single state will probably prove ineffective in general.
> For everything else, it’s up to parents or guardians to implement filters, content controls, and blocks.
Well, they are implementing the block through political pressure, and it's working
[1] - https://www.rtalabel.org/index.php?content=howtofaq#single
First of, I'd like to be clear, I don't think laws like this are the right way to go.
But to be fair, even if you are tech literate, which most parents aren't, this is actually pretty difficult to do.
And there are really three approaches you can take to this. You can use an allowlist of sites, but that is very restrictive, and limits the ability to explore, research, and learn how to use the internet generally. You can use a blocklist, but then you will always miss something, and it is a game of whack a mole. Or you can use some kind of AI, but that will probably both block things you don't want blocked, and allow things you do want blocked, and will probably add significant latency.
One possible way this could be improved is if websites with adult or mature content, or potential dangers to children (such as allowing the child to communicate with strangers, or gambling) returned a header that marked the content as possibly not suitable for children with a tag of the reason, and maybe a minimum age. Then a browser or firewall could be configured to block access to anything with headers for undesired content. Although, I think that would be most effective if there were laws requiring the headers to be honest.
Mississippi: They track "underage" and "adult" UK: They track "unknown [treated as underage]" and "adult"
It's interesting that age seems to be a protected class if you're above a certain age and not below.
Republicans, for many years now, have run on "stop big government regulations" without being specific.
The name is the same, but that's pretty much all that's left compared to 20ish years ago.
Then you have accounts that are age verified and accounts that are not age verified. Age verified accounts have the privilege of seeing sensitive content. Unverified accounts don’t have that privilege.
Some might see this as gravitating to bad laws. I see this as an attempt to address a prohibition on doing business.
That way you get both:
* companies that can provide the service (yay capitalism, middlemen and jobs!)
* compliance with the new laws that help to stratify users so that < 18 and > 18 users are identified and segregated.Briefly, your government would give you a signed digital copy of your government ID document. This copy would be cryptographically bound to secure hardware you own, typically your smartphone. I'll assume a smartphone for the rest of this.
When you want to reveal some fact from your ID to a site, such as "my ID says that my birthday is at least 18 years in the past", your device and the site use a zero knowledge proof (ZKP) protocol to prove to the site that this is true for the signed digital ID that is bound to your device. Nothing else from or about your digital ID is conveyed to the site.
Once this is out it should be pretty easy for sites to implement age checks for EU users.
The EU system is all open source and they've got a reference implementation on Github somewhere.
Google has also recently released in open source library at https://github.com/google/longfellow-zk for building such systems.
The main thing to ensure privacy with these kind of systems is making it so that the entity that issues the digital ID to your device is an entity that you don't mind proving your ID to with your physical government ID. Ideal would be for this to be handled by the same government agency that issues the physical ID.
Second best would be entities like banks that you already trust with your ID.
Creating an immediate market for age-verified accounts.
18 year old want some spare cash? Create a few dozen age verified accounts on your phone and sell them off for $1-2 each.
The next step is then tying logins to devices, and devices to identities. Then by using a website you must volunteer your identity. Dream come true for ad serving.
There is no contradiction, the way you address it is by giving up and gravitating to bad laws
The friends/family option is probably the most broadly effective at circumventing the block since you'll have a residential address but at the cost of a lot of latency and bandwidth. The most performant option will be VPS services but lots of sites will block them as well out of an abundance of caution.
> Unlike tech giants with vast resources, we’re a small team focused on building decentralized social technology that puts users in control. Age verification systems require substantial infrastructure and developer time investments, complex privacy protections, and ongoing compliance monitoring — costs that can easily overwhelm smaller providers.
> This decision applies only to the Bluesky app, which is one service built on the AT Protocol [...] We remain committed to building a protocol that enables openness and choice.
If someone else builds another app as a workaround, they aren't going to stop them. (Bluesky isn't decentralized enough in practice yet, but someday...)
> Luckily, we don’t have to imagine the scene because the High Court judgment details the last government’s reaction when it discovered this potentially rather large flaw. First, we are told, the relevant secretary of state (Michelle Donelan) expressed “concern” that the legislation might whack sites such as Amazon instead of Pornhub. In response, officials explained that the regulation in question was “not primarily aimed at … the protection of children”, but was about regulating “services that have a significant influence over public discourse”, a phrase that rather gives away the political thinking behind the act. They suggested asking Ofcom to think again and the minister agreed.
https://www.thetimes.com/comment/columnists/article/online-s...
What a shameful era. These fools delegintize the state, delegitimize the legal system. Engaged in absolute foolery.
The suggestion I saw was that residents of these states need to comb through every government site they can and sue the government for anything that could be harmful to youth that they find. Theres really no practical limit no possible implementation that the state has allowed other than to age verify pretty much everything; return-to-sender-ing the paper bag of flaming dog shit seems like a semi necessary step here.
And my opinion is that we shouldn't support such ways of doing this, meaning we shouldn't implement or comply with them, but rather protest against them. Either undermine their purpose or create a significant appearance of problems. In other words, either spread methods to bypass them, support such efforts in any way possible, or deny access to services (and so on) in jurisdictions where they're banned by inhumane laws. This is, in a way, a very common practice in the field of "copyright" and I sincerely hope it spreads to everyday matters.
It's deeply sad that nobody addresses the root problem - only its consequences, meaning they try to "hide unwanted content" instead of making it "non-unwanted." And it's even sadder that so few of those who could actually influence the implementation of such "protections" advocate this approach. Off the top of my head, I can only name Finland as one actively promoting educational programs and similar solutions to this problem.
Given that the opinion states that the law is "likely unconstitutional", isn't it too early to give up and block users?
Kye•8h ago
>> "Mississippi’s new law and the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA) are very different. Bluesky follows the OSA in the UK. There, Bluesky is still accessible for everyone, age checks are required only for accessing certain content and features, and Bluesky does not know and does not track which UK users are under 18. Mississippi’s law, by contrast, would block everyone from accessing the site—teens and adults—unless they hand over sensitive information, and once they do, the law in Mississippi requires Bluesky to keep track of which users are children."