Try running an online poker site abroad and serve US players and find out how that'll work out for you.
Didn't work out well for Lithuanian/Canadian/Israeli Isai Scheinberg founder of Poker Stars, nor Calvin Ayre, the founder of the Bodog, who ended up on the FBI's top 10 list. United States reportedly sought* to seize around $3 billion worth of assets from 3 major online poker companies at the time.
https://poker.stackexchange.com/questions/457/is-online-poke...
* Stop laughing. It's a hypothetical, wherein the US government only does internally lawful acts.
Eh, maybe? Maybe not? What if years later someone from that company flies through the UK? And if you think you can avoid connecting flights there, what if a flight from NY to CDG has to do an emergency landing and chooses somewhere in the UK?
The bigger problem is if the UK has an extradition treaty with the country you live in.
A maybe as clear as possible example of this is the Patriot Act, even though it’s now 24 years old. It was so easy to manipulate people being emotional and thinking they were doing good and stopping bad, when in reality they were doing the opposite.
I won’t even bother listing several other examples because people are still very deeply invested in those manipulations, because no one wants to believe a) they were so easily fooled and b) what they were raised to believe was just manipulative lies and actually bad, while being told it was good and supporting it made them good. It’s far easier thinking of oneself as good…which is the easily manipulated part.
It’s all very standard psychological manipulation stuff, it just takes on whole other self-fulfilling characteristics when it ascends to a complete majority scale, because things can’t be bad if everyone believes… was trained on it all their lives… right?
How would that work? do you want to provide government id to watch porn?
And how is this helping since it's not going to work overall (other sites, torrents, etc)
Can't wait for the headlines when the entire watch history of some famous person is released after someone recognises them in their "age verification scan".
It's about the only good thing which could come out of digital ID. Being able to proved proof of age in a double blind way.
The vague potential harm of sex doesn't justify the concrete harm of abolishing digital privacy. Further, it's just sex. Equating imagery of legal, natural activity with physical danger is an error.
It is blatantly dangerous to justify stripping citizens of their anonymity. The lawmakers who proposed this are oppressors. They are the danger to our children.
Come up with a better solution, provide a proof of concept and yes regulatory agencies / governments will take notice. People like us work in these agencies. Let's propose better ways of achieving the same goal of reducing porn exposure to minors - not keep bashing the initiative taken.
fair enough, but legislate this? why cant you just stop your own kid going on the internet? Id argue youre overblowing it but you cant ever remove the emotional/hysterical aspect when dealing with a parent
Parents are responsible for their children.
Most parents do a reasonably good job of regulating the physical environment their child exists in. At the same time, a lot of parents are out of their depth keeping up with all the threats that exist on the Internet.
Like with security of systems, there has to be defense in depth against these threats to children. Regulation is one of them. Parental efforts are another.
This isn't a situation where a parent is so overloaded that they need a village to help raise a child. This is just parents who have decided not to do anything.
But if we're going to go the village route, how about we send someone from say, a child welfare organization to visit every house with a child to walk parents/guardians through setting up the software on their devices - maybe with regular follow-ups to ensure the child's well-being in neglectful households that did not already have such software set up.
1. It doesn't stop kids from accessing porn because kids know about or can learn about free VPNs.
2. I think it exposes lots of adults to identity theft on non-porn websites by normalising compulsory ID checks. e.g. on Spotify, Bluesky, Reddit, etc. I think it's a matter of time before phishing sites start making use of this.
I think the implementors of this law either knew about these issues or are hopelessly naive.
Given that and the push for digital IDs at the same time I think they are bad actors and I question their motivation.
Or they decided that, on balance, there is still a net benefit to this starting point.
Doing nothing is not an option - the unregulated Internet is a cesspool. We've allowed children unregulated access to this for a couple of decades now. The argument that we cannot regulate this to protect kids, so we should just accept the damage it is doing is not acceptable any more.
Yes, effective regulation takes time to formulate. But you have to start somewhere and improve the situation.
1. The current status quo has been the default that's been in place for 20-30 years now
2. Despite this, the situation is so dire right now (did something new happen recently? Worldwide?) that we must do something about it now now now - even if that oversteps and takes away rights, even if it sells off your most private data to random third parties, even if it establishes a framework for broader censorship, doing something NOW is so important that it must trample all other concerns
My whole generation grew up on unrestricted internet, and while I agree that it's not the ideal situation, the experience I and everyone else I know had over these decades suggests that it's not the apocalyptic catastrophe that everyone pretends it to be. Something should be done, but it must be done carefully and in moderation as to avoid censoring and limiting adults in an attempt to make the entire internet child-first.
Instead, what we're seeing is half of the first world suddenly remembering about this after 20 years and steamrolling ahead in complete lockstep. Does this not worry you in any way? And look at what each one is proposing. Why are there no middle-ground privacy-first proposals anywhere? For some reason, those are confined to research papers and HN posts, not policy. Even without thinking of complicated cryptography and tokens and whatnot, think of this: what if ISPs were legally mandated to ship their routers in "child-censored mode" to everyone but businesses and households with no children? They would filter out all the websites that Ofcom or whatever other agency decides are inappropriate for children, but the router owner/operator could go in the settings and authorize individual devices for full internet access.
But that would place the burden of filtering appropriate content on the government, rather than every website in the world - and it wouldn't allow them to extract money via lawsuits and fines. More importantly, it also doesn't allow them to do favors and subcontract benevolent third-party businesses to store and process every user's identity in association with what they visit. I'm betting it's because of those reasons that any privacy-friendly approaches are a complete non-starter.
I think we would have a lot less of a pushback against such policing efforts if governments had done a better job at reigning in tracking on the internet from the start. "Porn websites should check your age" is not that radical, but in a world where it doesn't feel unrealistic that much of the information about you is correlated and processed in ways that are not in your personal best interest, then it becomes another loop in the proverbial noose that can be used to hang us all.
The real motivation behind this effort is not protecting children (the signal for that is all over the place), it’s about interrupting and conditioning society for a total surveillance state that controls or suppresses speech and thought. As always, the “think of the children” is just a typically cynical, narcissistic manipulation of people’s natural instincts to protect children.
Of course the underlying motivation is totalitarian. What, do you think they’re just going to come out and say “ok, peasants, we are not going to implement totalitarianism now”? No, they always sneak it in little by little, just as they always have, to the point that people still don’t understand what is going on in spite of things being as bad as they already are.
This is basically grooming, and no, the van does not have candy in it, kid.
If they actually cared about kids, they would have not banned and controlled adults from engaging in legal things freely, or they would have banned pornography as a clear societal ill. They could have also barred children from the open internet in general by allowing children only on a white/allow list; which is exponentially easier to implement, there is government justification, they are not full legal persons, and it can be enforced and penalized with existing child endangerment laws… you give access to a child, you are punished, just like if you, e.g., give children access to alcohol or any number of things.
What they choose to implement instead was that adults have to reveal their identity, essentially digital “show me your papers!”
The ruling class even constantly, openly talk about how they want everyone to have to provide their real identity on the internet to speak. They’re narcissists; all you have to do is listen to what they do and say to the audience they seek admiration from to see through the manipulation and lies directed towards you.
The dots are right next to each other and are labeled A and B. I am always a bit confused why so many people cannot, maybe don’t want to connect obvious dots; maybe because of what it means, not wanting to face reality because it causes discomfort in what they believe about things and themselves?
“I supported them and voted for them/this system. How could they be totalitarian? I would never vote for totalitarian control over myself, because I am smart and good. Therefore their intentions and motivations must be pure”. It’s a common abuse trap. It is also the underlying psychological manipulation mechanics of other cults and con artists, not just contemporary politicians.
While we can all see potential abuse (yelling FIRE in a crowded theater), surely the IRL abuse by governments is equally clear, with possibly a higher potential for damage.