• cley_faye@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    I think that was the point. Not only decentralized services, but a lot of small and/or individual services too. The way age verification is done is both stupid, and expensive. Only the big names will remain.

  • HiTekRedNek@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    This is exactly the kind of government overreach people like me have been screaming about since, in my case, the 1990s.

    “I told you so” just doesn’t feel so good when what’s happening is nothing less than the entirety of human freedom and liberty is being eroded before our very eyes, and those who disagree with it get labeled as kooks, and accused of hating whatever “oppressed group” of the day is in vogue.

    • General_Effort@lemmy.worldOP
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      3 days ago

      Yes. I had always worried about the copyright industry. That was the big money pushing for censorship. Controlling access and exchange of information is part of their business model and even personal ideology. But I don’t know how much this has actually to do with them, and how much is simply the will to power.

      What I did not see coming at all was how the left would completely 180 on these issues. That, at least, I blame on the copyright industry.

      Right wing people have screeched about “the intolerant left” forever, but I always ignored the obvious hypocrisy. I took it as a debate on what is permissible in polite society. But now Europe is at a point where there is simply a consensus against free speech. Only the most illiberal forces will be able to use these legal weapons to full effect. That will be the extreme right.

      • HiTekRedNek@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        It’s just a logical extension of what happens when government becomes the arbitrator of all.

        The biggest issue is that so many people see it just as you do, left vs right, instead of liberty vs authoritarianism.

        For decades, the libertarian movement, as seen by the left, has been largely associated with the right, simply because of their professed support of the free market, and dislike of gun control

        But that same movement has been seen by the right as largely associated with the left, because of their views on things like the drug war, enforced morality, and anti-corporatism.

        Has there been a large shift of alt-right into the libertarian movement over the past few years? Yes. Absolutely. And I despise it with a passion.

        But there are still quite a lot of us truly anti-authoritarian libertarians out there who despise both left, and right leaning authoritarianism.

        But when I bring up issues of authoritarianism, I get “BoTh SiDeS?!” bullshit responses. Because YES, as we can see, BOTH SIDES do their own fair share of this authoritarian bullshit.

        They differ in methods, yes. But the bottom line is an encroachment on personal privacy. Plus, property rights are just a logical extension of personal privacy rights.

        • joel_feila@lemmy.world
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          2 days ago

          Well to be fair the left in the usa does have another reason to see the libertarian party as just another right wing party. They vote republican when it comes down to D vs R

          • HiTekRedNek@lemmy.world
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            2 days ago

            I’ve never voted for a Republican OR Democrat that I didn’t know personally in my entire life. Why do I add that qualifier? Because I did know some older small town politicians, in both US parties, back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when my grandfather was still alive, and they were his friends.

              • HiTekRedNek@lemmy.world
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                1 day ago

                No. Voting for the lesser of two evil is still voting for evil. I’ll write someone in before I vote for some party functionary that only cares about their own political power.

    • BangCrash@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      You’ve been screaming about internet censorship since before the internet?

      Fucking time traveller right here

      • HiTekRedNek@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        … I was online in 1993, bro. I was dialing into BBSs with worldwide fidonet bulletin boards even earlier than that.

        Don’t be such a dipshit.

        • BangCrash@lemmy.world
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          3 days ago

          Back in my day we had to dial in to get the internet.

          GoddamnGl Gubberment ruining everything

        • BangCrash@lemmy.world
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          3 days ago

          Nah. OCs a whinging boomer.

          “Screaming” “People like me” “liberties eroding before our very eyes”

          It’s like he’s never read a history book. Or travelled outside his state.

    • sunbeam60@lemmy.ml
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      3 days ago

      I too have been screaming about private online since the 90s. I have an intuitive reaction that sort of mirrors yours.

      But can I ask you a question?

      And it’s one that I’m asking because I genuinely wish to learn from others.

      Because I can’t quite see the difference and maybe there’s something I’m missing.

      Why is it not government overreach to ensure pornography isn’t sold to minors in an adult video store, but government overreach to have the same expectation of online pornography providers?

      I would love your enlightened view on this so I can learn from it. Because I can’t quite see the difference.

      I understand that many adults go into an adult video store and need not prove their age, because they clearly look like adults.

      And so the difference here is that everyone have to prove their age online, even people that are clearly adults by how they look.

      But entering a pornography website is the equivalent of entering an adult video store where the clerk cannot see you, cannot hear your voice. In that world I would also expect the clerk to check every purchase as they would have no other means of assessing the buyer’s age.

      Or maybe you think that adult videos should be sold to everyone and it’s the very concept that pornography is restricted to minors that you disagree with. I don’t personally hold that view but then I can least understand why you would also reject online age verification.

      Or maybe you think it is ineffective and won’t make a difference. That argument I most definitely agree with, but how we choose to implement a law, and whether it’s effective, is two different discussions I would posit.

      Edit: I love that I’m getting downvoted for expressing a POV respectfully.

      • AnyOldName3@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        There is no possible way to actually stop teenagers accessing online porn that doesn’t require such a massive invasion of privacy that it leaves no safe way for adults to access it. To go with your adult video store analogy, it’s like if the store staff would have to accompany you home and watch you watching the porn to check there wasn’t anyone standing behind you also looking at the screen, and while they were there, they were supposed to take notes on everything they saw. Even if they had no interest in doing anything nefarious, a criminal could steal their notebook and blackmail all their customers with the details it contained, and there’d be enough proof that there wouldn’t be any way to plausibly claim the blackmailer had just made everything up.

        If you want to prove someone on the Internet is a real adult and not a determined teenager, you need lots of layers. E.g. if you just ask for a photo of an ID card, that can be defeated by a photo of someone else’s ID card, and a video of a face can be defeated by a video game character (potentially even one made to resemble the person whose ID has been copied). You need to prove there’s an ID card that belongs to a real person and that it’s that person who is using it, and that’s both easier to fake than going to a store with a fake ID (if you look young, they’ll be suspicious of your ID) or Mission Impossible mask, and unlike in a store, the customer can’t see that you’re not making a copy of the ID card for later blackmail or targeted advertisements. No one would go back to a porn shop that asked for a home address and a bank statement to prove it.

        Another big factor is that if there’s a physical shop supplying porn to children, the police will notice and stop it, but online, it’s really easy to make a website and fly under the radar. It’s pretty easy for sites that don’t care about the law to provide an indefinite supply of porn to children, and once that’s happening, there’s no reason to think that it’s only going to be legal porn just being supplied to the wrong people.

        Overall, the risk of showing porn to children doesn’t go down very much, but the risk of showing blackmailable data to criminals and showing particularly extreme and illegal porn to children goes up by a lot. Protecting children from extreme material, e.g. videos of real necrophilia and rape, which are widely accepted to be seriously harmful, should be a higher priority than protecting a larger number from less extreme material that the evidence says is less harmful, if at all. Even if it’s taken as fact that any exposure to porn is always harmful to minors, the policies that are possible to implement in the real world can’t prevent it, just add either extra hassle or opportunities for even worse things to happen. There hasn’t been any proposal by any government with a chance of doing more good than harm.

      • AeonFelis@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        Funny - I assume on one here was actually involved in creating the law that requires identification when buying pornography (or alcohol. Or tobacco) at stores, but we are all considered responsible for it to the point we are hypocrite if we object a similar law?

        If someone says they are against that law now, years after it’s already established and spread, it won’t be taken as “I’m generally against the government limiting our freedom to consume what we want” but as “I want to push children to consume porn/alcohol/tobacco”. So no one argues against these laws. But it’s much more feasible to argue against the new laws - a ship that’s still in the port.

        30 years from now, when they make the law that neural implants must detect illegal thoughts in the users’ biological brains and block them, you’d make the argument that it’s not fundamentally different than blocking the same topics on the internet - a practice that, by that time, will already be accepted by the general populace.

      • Kaerkob@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        Not OP, but I think the analogy to what is happening to online privacy would be if you were asked to identify yourself at every location: the grocery store, the farmers market, the corner park, the trail along the river; and all of those checkpoints were aggregated and sold, meaning that someone who might not have your best interests at heart could use your travel timeline against you, to advertise to you, to sue you, to charge you with a crime, to destroy your public reputation.

        • sunbeam60@lemmy.ml
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          3 days ago

          I’m am 100% any form of checks that identify you.

          But for what it is worth the European Union’s proposed framework for this legally mandates zero knowledge proofs.

          The UK’s implantation sucks. Big hairy monkey balls.

          If you buy alcohol at a farmer’s market, the seller has a responsibility to ensure they’re not supplying it to a child. At least in most countries.

      • General_Effort@lemmy.worldOP
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        3 days ago

        But entering a pornography website is the equivalent of entering an adult video store where the clerk cannot see you, cannot hear your voice.

        There’s the problem. I was tempted to call this Boomer logic, but that would extremely unfair to Boomers. We are only seeing this now, that the Boomers are on the way out.

        I think the Boomers understood better how this works. It’s not like entering a store. It’s like making a phone call to the store, and the store may be on the other side of the world. The Boomers understood borders, long distance calls, international mail.

        Now the digital natives are taking over. And they understand nothing beyond tapping and swiping.

        Spoilered is a post I wrote earlier. Just so you know what’s coming.

        spoiler

        The problem is that meat-space logic is applied to the cyberspace (as it might have been said in the 90ies).

        You go into a store and the clerk sees you and knows your age. If it’s borderline, then they ask for ID. They are applying that thinking to internet services.

        Where this falls down is that no ordinary Mastodon instance can comply with the regulations of the close to 200 hundred countries in the world. Of course, just like 4chan, many wouldn’t want to out of principle.

        The only way to make this work is to introduce another meat-space thing: Border posts. You need a Great Firewall of the [Local Nation]. At physical border posts, guards check if goods comply with local regulations. We need virtual border posts to check if data is imported and exported in compliance with local regulations.

        Such a thing, a virtual Schengen border, was briefly considered in the EU about 15 years ago. It went nowhere at the time. But if you look at EU regulations, you can see that the foundations are already laid, most obviously with the GDPR but also the DSM, DMA, DSA, CRA, …

        Eventually, the border will be closed to protect our values; to enforce our laws. We will lock out those American and Chinese Big Tech companies that steal our data. We will only allow their European branches and strictly monitor their communications abroad. We will be taking back control, as the Brexiteers sloganized it. Freedom is just another word for having to ask the government for permission when you enter a country. And increasingly, it is another word for having to ask permission for how you use your own computer.

        It won’t be some shady backroom deal. Look here. People in this community love these regulations. Europeans here are happy to tell US companies to “FO if they don’t want to follow our laws”. Well, the Great Firewall of Europe is how you do that.

        https://lemmy.world/comment/19119670

      • HiTekRedNek@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        Parents have the ultimate say-so of what their kids have access to.

        I don’t believe there needs to be a law that says that, no.

        If a parent decides their kid is responsible enough to have their own money, then it’s the parents who are to blame if that kid buys “bad” things with that money.

        Same thing online. If a parent decides their kid is responsible enough to have unrestricted internet access, then it’s their fault if the kid then goes to a “bad” website.

        It’s not the store’s fault. Nor is it the website’s fault.

        We have given away far too much of our parental responsibility over to 3rd parties, and now we don’t know how to parent anymore.

        • sunbeam60@lemmy.ml
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          3 days ago

          So you would also support a child buying alcohol online on account of being given money and access to the internet?

          • HiTekRedNek@lemmy.world
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            3 days ago

            Support? Absolutely not.

            Allow? Not my child.

            Make illegal? Nope. Not my business to tell other parents how to raise their children.

            And that’s exactly the problem here. People like YOU, who think that if I don’t want something illegal, than that of course means I like that thing, or that I personally want to do that thing.

            Nope. It has to do with personal autonomy. I’m not your boss, I shouldn’t get to tell YOU what you can do to yourself. Period.

  • VampirePenguin@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    I don’t see how Mississippi or the UK think they can issue laws on sites hosted outside their jurisdiction. That’s just mind boggling. The onus is on the state to provide age verification, or make their ISPs do it.

    • cley_faye@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      Watch the whole world go “ahaha age verification go brrrrr” in the next months/years, and we’ll talk again. I’m particularly baffled at the EU that was all “privacy friendly, consumer first” until a handful of month ago.

  • Default Username@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    3 days ago

    Lucky for Mastodon and other ActivityPub projects, they don’t need to host any servers. People outside of regions where age verification is required can host the servers instead.