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- Hacker News
- Interesting that they mention the UK but forget that the EU also wants to protect the kids by banning VPNsby rvnx
- That would be interesting if the UK were still in the EU, no?by gib444
- 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?
- 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...
by windowliker - I love how the comments miss that the problem these laws address deserve addressing, but from the producers side: making safe products for the public. This specific solution is fashioned after tobacco and alcohol regulation, which was never primarily about parental supervision, it's about what can be sold and how. And in public health we'd want everyone moving away from both not just kids. The boneheadness of age verification is that unlike tobacco and alcohol, where the best we can do is restrict access, online harm can actually be fixed at the root by regulating what these services are allowed to do to users in the first place.by braiamp
- The issue is, to regulate the service Meta (or whoever) provides, they have to age gate anyway. Unless the service is child friendly for all users. Which would mean; follow and friend limits, usage limits, blackout periods after 9pm, only seeing posts from friends, no algorithmic "time line". That sort of thing.
That regulation would be orders of magnitude more difficult to implement. Just look at the malicious compliance the cookie regulations created, that was a single modal.
Better to just ban it for under 16s. That might happen before my kids are old enough to be fully exploited.
by phatfish - 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.
by cryo32 - 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].
- Why does your last sentence sound like something yoda would say?by shreddit
- 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.
by ktallett - > They will ultimately win.
Sorry, who will win?
by gib444 - User to Mozilla: Cannot read your statement with a variant of your own browser because you have it "protected" by an internet gatekeeper.by usr1106
- Are you referring to Cloudflare?
I am using a fork of Firefox and it works perfectly fine.
by HDBaseT - > Rather than age-gating technologies like VPNs, we believe that regulators should address the root causes of online harm by holding platforms to account
Honest question: if you tell Pornhub "now you will be fined heavily if you let 10-year old kids access porn", won't Pornhub implement some kind of age verification?
How else would the platform "address the root cause"?
by palata - You're asking if verified user accounts on a porn site are more or less invasive than the government banning or restricting access to VPNs?by 1shooner
- Age gating the VPN age gates (pseudo-anonymous) access to 100% of the content on the internet. Regardless of whether or not you agree with it, age gating only the porn subset of the internet is a much smaller restriction.by riknos314
- The easiest, and the fairest way in my opinion, is to realize parents can and should be responsible for what their children read. Just like you wouldn't give your kid access to your BDSM porn magazines from the 80s, you shouldn't let him online without supervision.
Other than that, there is no "online harm". No root cause of anything that would need to be addressed, no problems whatsoever. It's just information passing through from one person to another.
Laws like age verification will just push kids to even weirder corners of the internet. When will 4chan or motherless implement age verification? On pornhub you see vanilla porn on the front page. On 4chan or motherless you see CP (AI, but still), (fake) rape or (fake) murders. And there are many more sites like those.
by iamalizard - That's why the government wants to get rid of them.by borzi
- While their arguments are sound, Perhaps Mozilla should disclose in this document that they are also a VPN reseller.by speedgoose
- 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?by Izmaki
- This is the Mozilla foundation, the VPN seller is Mozilla corporation.by RobotToaster
- It would sound like an advertisement though, so in some way it’s better they don’t mention itby rvnx
- 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.
by rustyhancock - 1984 was meant to be a warning, not the UK’s digital infrastructure roadmap
- Reality has become indistinguishable from satire.by tempodox
- 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.
by juleiie - Has Google made a statement like this?
I guess since I complain about Mozilla a lot for their past 5-10 years (minimum) of poor management decisions, I should give them their due when they do come out with a statement of support on our rights.
by wormius - It is perhaps worth highlighting that Mozilla has done this in response to a specific UK government consultation [1] all about "growing up in the online world", which has, buried about 30 pages deep, a specific question about age-gating VPNs and similar technologies.
As far as I can tell, there is no requirement to be a UK citizen to answer this – if you are, were, or could be resident in the UK I urge you to fill it out and help provide a voice of reason...
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/growing-up-in-th...
by azalemeth - 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...by ayashko
- 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.by monk_grilla