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It baffles me that parents have become so lazy they don't even want to monitor what their kid does anymore online, and instead expect the government to do all the work.

I remember when my daughter wanted to play Roblox with some friends I sure as shit did my best to monitor and lock down that horrible thing. Same with just general internet monitoring. Whenever she wants to play some game or something I research it.

I have sat down with her countless times and yeah she has broken my trust a few times and she looses access to the internet.

> I have sat down with her countless times and yeah she has broken my trust a few times and she looses access to the internet.

All that does is encourage her to lie and find work-arounds rather than fess-up and suffer consequences.

my teenager self finds this as a challenge and just a way to defy your authority

TBF my boomer parents didn't monitor a single thing I did on the internet, so I kinda doubt it's some unique failure of contemporary parents.

But was this in the late 90s/early 00s? I mean … it was kinda different then, no?

I - 49 - also had boomer parents who didn't monitor my internet back then. I really don't think it can be compared to today.

don't know if you had a similar experience, but my folks didn't pay much attention to ANY of the stuff I ingested, data, chemical, or otherwise.

My partner, a gen Xer, had it even looser. Talks about just hanging out in a patch of random dirt until the street lights came on.

Notably, I haven't heard anyone use the terms 'helicopter' or 'bulldozer' parenting lately, and I kind of wonder if it's because that's just the norm, now.

Frankly the amount of outrageous deranged shit I saw on IRC and Usenet as a preteen kinda makes me conflicted on this point, whether the internet is "worse" today. Like, I had already seen the gaping asshole of goatse probably hundreds of times before I graduated high school so... lol

My parents tried but they know about as much about technology as a typical boomer so by the time I was in high school it became totally ineffective.

> I sure as shit did my best to monitor and lock down that horrible thing

How much of that "horrible thing" is due to a handful of youtube videos you've seen as opposed to first-hand experiences? What if you found out that the very well-produced youtube videos which regularly attack Roblox have the exact same agenda as the US/UK laws you're opposing?

Oh, its definitely a dumpster fire. And they keep changing the parental controls to make it less obvious what's appropriate for what age.

And then there's the constant begging for fewer restrictions and more things being permitted, to the point where you're basically screaming "no" in their face and want to smash the damn tablet.

Then it settles down, and starts up again a month later.

The world doesn’t consider it reasonable for businesses to sell beer to kids, and expect us all to constantly follow our kids around to make sure they don’t get beer. Bars don’t get to say ‘woops, we got thousands of 9 year olds drunk, their parents should keep an eye on them’”.

And at this point, most kids, most people, spend more time online than outside walking around

First websites, then VPN's, and then keywords ...

WAIT! SCRATCH THAT!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XKeyscore

Why not just build spyware into every computer?

WAIT! SCRATCH THAT!

https://copilot.microsoft.com/

So here's the solution. AGO: Artificial General Orgasmatron. Be working on it.

Since it's hardware, parents can restrict access at the source.

Age verification built-in? Well, since it knows your secret desires in order to work, it obviously knows your age.

One in every home. Hallucinations? It works entirely through hallucinations. Since the user builds the fantasy bank (Large Lust Model, or LLM) there's no need for an internet connection.

It’s hard to control the narrative when people can say what they want on the internet, anonymously, without being punished for it.

It'll be alright. We've dealt with manic authoritarians who dream of planetary control before. Just another quick world war and the development of an even more sinister superweapon and we'll be right back to thinking in sane, evenhanded terms. Or dead.

Or, you know, we could huck our failed systems out with the trash instead. Reinvent democracy to be more direct and flexible. Could be nice.

Why do you want people punished for saying things?

I guess maybe this was sarcasm. If so, carry on good sir.

> Why do you want people punished for saying things?

I am not the OP, but I interpreted them as suggesting this serves as a good form of censorship while advertised as improving child safety.

Rather, they are saying governments want to control the narrative and anonymous speech impedes that.

Not OP but while I don't seek "punishment", I do seek accountability. I know that might seem like a flowery synonym at best, or an amorphous piece of jargon at worst, but if we are to treat online spaces as public forums, we need to structure these spaces like public forums, which means having consequences for abject lies. The "but who decides" response is a thought-terminating cliche that we need to collectively move past. Until we stop letting the perfect get in the way of the good enough, we will continue to let bad actors dictate the public understanding of technological issues, and of issues more generally (eg: antivax).

The trump administration in the US also frames its crackdown on civil society in terms of "accountability for lies". But I guess its fine when your side does it.

And here is Exhibit A of those responsible for the status quo.

How much more will it take before people resort to direct action against the government? It's been shown time and time again that once stuff like this has been done that the government will never let it be undone.

https://archive.is/PJapz

The UK government is facing calls to restrict children’s access to VPNs.

VPNs aren't capable of harming kids. They aren't content and even the usual imagined harms can't be caused by a VPN.

The Gov's entire argument seems to be 'We aren't getting our way".

Imagine if Gov officials cared about Gov officials trading law for favors - like they do about popular hysteria.

Who is making these calls?

Attacks on tech that protect speech tend to come from political interests. Attacks on tech that protect privacy often come from law enforcement.

The actual goals are always to maximize control over the public while Gov officials and their allies avoid accountability.

So when do we get to the Great Firewall of the UK?

What is the best way to harden the internet against these imbeciles?

Take the control of its direction away from companies like Google, which double as government access points to mass surveillance, for one.

Antitrust. Smaller more distributed ISPs.

Or internet backbone alternatives. Household backyard microwave repeater mesh networks? Residential wifi meshes?

I'm only indulging in sci fi because I don't have a good answer either. I do hate being dependent on systems with few points of failure.

On the one hand, fuck creepy government overreach.

On the other hand, fuck scummy porn and social media platforms.

Can we get rid of both? Maybe we can have some kind of Hamlet-esque ending where they all die in the duel.

Lawmakers making laws about technical matters don't realize that they don't understand those technical matters well enough to make intelligent laws about them.

Shocking! Unprecedented! Film at 11!

It’s for the kids…

The money quote is that it's not at all clear whether the sudden VPN usage is from kids or from adults to (I think rightfully) don't want to hand over their government id or their CC to random websites.

Because yeah, fuck that shit. The presumption should be that all content on the internet is for adults. If you want your site to be child friendly you can opt into a higher standard of moderation. How did we go from the internet is for porn to this?!

If I were of the mind that children are delicate little flowers that must be protected from everything in the world lest they shatter like a fancy vase (and I am not), this is not the plan I would be pushing. There's no way this path leads to better protection for kids.

You want to sequester children from the 'harms' of the internet? You have to do more work - create a .kids TLD and build browsers and websites for that. Make a smartphone that has the protections baked into the kernel (and works fine for everything else a phone must be so parents actually buy them). Attempting to graft child protection into the existing ecosystem is attempting to build a tower on top of a swamp. It simply isn't happening.

Unless (and I think we all see this) the goal isn't to build the tower, but to convince people to pave the swamp.

The 'think of the kids' argument is also kind of dumb at face value. So what, like at 18 you're magically gifted with the ability to understand and manage the hard edges of the world? How on earth are you supposed to develop that understanding in a vacuum? I think we're not giving kids enough credit, frankly. Each generation seems to develop a more nuanced and complex view of the world than the generations previous (which makes sense, they learned with better tech).

people pay to read The Verge?

VPNs were the target from the beginning. Whenever a politician says "think of the children," it's the beginning of the wedge strategy.

That implies a plan, its more lurch from one thing to the next expedient thing.

This honestly so pathetic, you have to consider that bongs arent even people anymore.