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- Hacker News
- Dear goverments, if you care about KIDS, provide them a separete internet outside of ICANN with mandatory ID. Let the rest of the people create an anonymous, adult internet with no ID's.by anthk
- So Tor?
- It’s quickly being understood as a ploy for mass surveillance.by aklemm
- call and email your congresspeoples, and tell them not to go through with thisby shomp
- Then donate millions in campaign contributions to ensure they actually care at all what you think!by none2585
- and have your children on the phone telling them to not let companies store and leak their information before they are old enough to consent to this.
If they are asking you to leave a message, have your kids leave the message.
by Bender - Details on how to do that here:by monksy
- And if they do it anyway? Sure, you can vote them out but it's hard to dislodge incumbents especially over policy choices rather than obvious problems like corruption. Then even after you've ejected them, you need to push their successor into the Sisyphean task of rewriting populist legislation.
Representative democracy is not adequate to the demands of the information age, where the informational asymmetry between individual and state is unprecedented in history. It's time to explore other models like administrative democracy.
by anigbrowl - Don't forget to enclose a checkby CamperBob2
- Isn't it interesting how they're doing it in every anglo country simultaneously? How does that work?by andai
- We do not need to lose our rights to privacy because people want to control what their kids do and see. (I'm not even convinced this is true - this is likely just a convenient lie told by the politicians, because I don't see parents clamoring for this.)
We're below replacement rate, so it's not like most people are even having kids, anyway. Yet we have to give up our freedom for other people to raise little Christian tots (or whatever the motivation for this is billed as)?
I grew up in a Deep South Protestant household. Having access to the unfiltered internet got me interested in STEM. Bumping into occasional shock sites and porn as a preteen did not turn me into a satanist cannibal.
Keeping "Kids Safe" is a LIE.
This is about putting collars on every US citizen.
They'll filter you into groups.
They'll control what loans and jobs you can get.
They'll use this information to blackmail you should you ever run for office or gain wealth or power.
This is a threat to democracy and personal liberty.
Child safety is a LIE.
by echelon - Oh for goodness’ sake, can’t the government (federal or states) create a service that will simply give out a token when someone has passed the age they want (eg 18), and provably goes through a multipart mixer, or just give you a zero-knowledge proof on the device of your choice, anytime you need?
On a related note, if they will require a specific kind of ID to vote, can’t they just make sure everyone can receive that ID?
Of course they can. They don’t want to. And they pretend like they don’t know how to. What this government is lacking, is a distribution system.
To be fair, they will need digital IDs or NFC chips in IDs since deepfakes can now fake the physical IDs next to your face in real time.
by EGreg - Note that the EU is proposing to do this [0]. The ZKP part is a bit of a WIP and there have been some questions about the quality [1].
[0] https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/faqs/eu-age-verific...
by ekr____ - It can't, because the government doesn't know shit about technology. Someone who knows tech, is close to the government, and isn't corrupt, would have to propose it and explain what this zorro-proof knowy doohicky is. The government knows ID checks because you get checked at bars.by microgpt
- In many states, children under some age are prohibited from using firearms. There is substantial evidence to show that firearms pose a real and present harm to individual children and large groups.
An excellent rider to the KIDS act would be to mandate the installation of age (that is, identity) verification to all firearms in order to disable the safety.
by Humorist2290 - Fun fact: Most firearms don't have a manual safety that you disengage.by BeetleB
- It is hard to tell if this is a joke based on the username. There are people with this perspective though I assume. Thus I will respond to it.
It's worth noting OP's proposed technology is impossibly far from existing in practice. Importantly, there are at least half a billion citizen-owned firearms in the USA without this theoretical technology, already. Therefore we should focus on something more effective. Such as better mental health treatment, bullying prevention, gang prevention, or any other precursors to violent behavior.
by ruffrey - Motor vehicles are very dangerous too, including higher-power e-bikes.
Lock those out too unless you can provide digital ID (and a high enough social credit score) each time you attempt to start them.
by bluescrn - Parents already have the ability to lock down Android or iOS devices for their own children, if they choose to do so.by GeekyBear
- Super awesome as long as your kids never go anywhere they could access a non-locked-down device. And assuming that device parental controls work, which (at least on iOS) they don't [1].
1. https://www.macworld.com/article/2305919/apple-parental-cont...
by anjiro - If we expect the behavior of parents to change we must change their incentives.
Providing access to social media must be met with the same punishment as offering heroin to children. The monopoly on violence must be brought to bear on parents who neglect parental responsibilities.
by kelseyfrog - That's just not true. If you give your kid WhatsApp access because that's how 95% of their peers text each other, then your kid has access to a hidden chat that can only be revealed by typing a secret code in the search bar.
Tell me how a parent is supposed to parent their kid when they can do that? Locking down WhatsApp is no solution because then they can't talk to anyone. (Other countries do not use SMS as much as the US does, it's mostly WhatsApp.)
Say you are sure your kid is being bullied or abused and you want to check their phone. You can't. From the password to encrypted apps kids can hide their communications in ways that are impossible for a parent to check.
Apps do not have "child modes" that disable all the secret stuff, although that would be nice.
by ars - Parental controls are extremely weak on all the major platforms. Apple, Google, Amazon, etc. they all have them so they can check the box but they are not good and certainly not a solution.
That said, it is better than nothing, but that’s about it.
by jtmarl1n - So, the mafia now reveals its evil face. It wants to censor young people's way to access information, without conforming to an "age check". This is the first step, the next is to require of this of everyone else.
This is the biggest attack on personal freedom since decades. It is time to crush those lobbyists that push for this.
By the way, even ignoring the propaganda by the lobbyists here, at which point did the "discussion" suddenly become to deny young people access to information? Because this is implied here. Some people were underage when wikipdia first emerged. The age sniffing here tries to undermine and revert all of that.
by shevy-java - > This is the first step, the next is to require of this of everyone else.
This is the threat day one. They get both groups' information.
Next, they'll start to purge information they don't like because it has been corralled off from the rest of the internet.
If they get lucky to trap a politician or billionaire in their net (and they will), they'll use that information to control how they vote or fund interests.
Next, they'll start to clamp down of people in the group they don't like. They'll lose jobs, banking, get extra audits, and have friction applied to their lives and chances of success.
Over time the fundamentalist group embraces government monitoring and control. The youth are brought up on it. The oligarchy use it to remove their enemies.
Within two generations we're living in 1984.
by echelon - Would this website (HN) be a "covered platform" according to the bill?
As far as I can tell, the answer is no, because it doesn't do what's described in Section 201 (E):
"Uses the personal information of the user to advertise, market, or make content recommendations."
Neither does, for example, my bank's website, or someone's personal blog, or many other discussion sites like this one. So from what I can see, while the set of covered platforms is certainly not negligible, it's still a lot smaller than "basically every website on the Internet that anyone cares about". So the title of the EFF article is overstating the case; the thing the bill would require age checks for (in effect, if not by the explicit language of the bill) is not "get online" but something more like "get on social media".
by pdonis - It’s not just “social media”. Any site that’s funded by advertising fits that description.by antonvs
- No, because:
with respect to which more than one-third of the material made available thereon is sexual material harmful to minors; and (C) with respect to which the provider of such platform knowingly makes available the sexual material harmful to minors described in subparagraph (B).
(look for line 19 to see the covered platform)
Of course, it's a delicious web they're trying to weave - pass it now by casting the think of the children spell, amend and reinterpret later to soften the guardrails until everything is in scope and demands commercial ID checks, driving ID check industry software and adoption, until psuedo-anonymity on the web is virtually gone. Or do it with any combination of other bills.
by 9x39 - > …is not "get online" but something more like "get on social media".
Which for ordinary people is the same thing, alas.
by 1over137 - You need to be more realist.
"Uses the personal information of the user to advertise"
Is 99.9% of all websites. So long as websites don't sell things, they will be having ads.
This includes Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, Imgur, TikTok, Twitch, Youtube, etc. I think even Steam and other game platforms would fall into this category despite the fact they make money selling products. Naturally search engines also fall into this category.
Websites like HN are the exception, not the norm.
It's also disingenuous to say "a personal blog" would be exempt from this when most people don't have blogs in first place since they start microblogging instead. In fact, most people don't want to go through the trouble of maintaining their own blog, dealing with spam, hosting, hacking attempts, software updates, etc., when they can just use tumblr and pin the responsibility on the platform anytime something bad happens.
by AlienRobot