I am completely baffled by this wave of new laws and proposals... they feel dystopic and can seemingly only lead to brutal restrictions on the internet. What will we end up with? Only attested modems / endpoints in the home? With DPI? And a government issued smartcard to use it? It comes across as if this is what some legislators are actually after... they must have some technical advisors who can explain to them that the solutions they propose will not work and I am a bit worried they will morph the public discussion into enforcing at a lower level otherwise "the bad guys still circumvent"??

Utah hosts I think the biggest nsa data center.

Honestly, I would like my ISP to block all traffic to and from Utah if this law passes. I can't think of anything I want or need that involves that state.

I'm confused where all of this censorship is originating from. What wave of efforts is culminating? I can't really explain this from any movement I can see.

> What will we end up with? Only attested modems / endpoints in the home?

you might laugh/cry, but there was a time in germany, when the telephone at home was owned by the state (the "Post") and you were NOT allowed to tinker with it.

personally, i guess, things like sneakernet, lorawan and hamradio will become a lot more popular over time.

When discussing Utah, you shouldn't ignore the role that Mormonism's theocratic authoritarian culture and embrace of the MAGA movement has had. Human rights, like right to privacy, will always be trampled by their desire to legislate their morality. The Utah territory was literally founded as a theocracy.

One could infer that they’re trying to make porn illegal in their legislature’s desire to build the United and Puritanical States of America, which itself stems from the hope that increasing the internal sexual pressures in men will reverse the growing trend of intolerance for misogyny among both men and women. That reversal most benefits today’s adherents of misogyny, a population that is strongly represented in Utah, and comes at a cost — viewed as a net transfer of control from women to men — that is societally acceptable for them to make subservient women pay. (If this were various other states like South Carolina or Oregon, I’d point out the usual labor-economics connection to replacing more-illegal race-based slavery with less-illegal gender-based slavery now that the former’s illegal, but Utah’s home to a large religious group that has and remains focused on the gendered form first, so it doesn’t seem applicable here.)

> I am completely baffled by this wave of new laws and proposals... they feel dystopic

Baffled? The whole country's democracy is diving off this cliff, seems to me.

> I am completely baffled by this wave of new laws and proposals...

I'm not surprised in the slightest, the direction's been clear for more than 20 years now, so I've stopped looking for technical solutions, they will always be stop-gap measures if politics isn't fixed.

The people making these decisions are religious fanatics. They don’t care.

This is one of the reasons why the purge of the federal government and military has happened. Surveillance state stuff was pretty scary from day 1… doubly so now that the leadership is all toadies who will remain embedded for decades.

> they must have some technical advisors

I dare you to get half a dozen people with a technical background to call their electeds and explain why these rules are stupid. (And, if they insist on implementing age gates, as seems to be popular, the least worst ways to do it.)

> they must have some technical advisors who can explain to them that the solutions they propose will not work

I would expect they mostly listen to special interests advocating for those laws. They don’t come from nowhere

It's not the first time when people who despise liberty of others and want to force them jump through unreasonable hoops shoot themselves in their feet.

Saying "you're unwelcome here" to a large enough number of well-meaning people usually backfires. I hope this will be felt during the next elections in Utah.

>>they must have some technical advisors who can explain to them that the solutions they propose will not work

You are assuming good faith on the part of those legislators.

That is an error.

There is no good faith to be had and they could not care less about physical restrictions, incompatibilities, or impossibilities.

Their goal is to maximize their power and minimize or eliminate people's power, regardless of whether it is legitimate or desired by the people they claim to represent.

You would be more productive summoning the ghost of Richard Feynman to explain quantum physics to a dung beetle than to have a network expert attempt to enlighten those pseudo-legislators.

Also notice that even on here, a site ostensibly for "hackers" and other traditionally civil liberty-minded users, we don't tend to hear about these proposed laws until they're already passed or otherwise too late to stop.

Some might find that a bit odd.

when can we hold lawmakers personally responsible for any consequences resulting from passing bad laws?

The end goal is a government license to access the internet. But I think it's less regulatory, and more poli-social. There are individuals within the political stratosphere that are adamantly against anonymity on the Internet because they want to be able to attach speech to specific individuals, and punish if necessary for wrong-think.

I am completely baffled by this wave of new laws and proposals

Follow the money. Ten to one, it all leads back to Zuckerberg.

We will end up with what China, Russia and Iran have. The American right has come to grips with the fact that their ideas and beliefs will not will not win on merit alone so they're moving to restrict and eliminate alternatives.

Well, people who call a fascism a fascism are always wrong until they suddenly aren't.

The country is descending into fascism. If you’ve previous endulged in the politics of “I don’t care about politics”, it’s time to stop and look around you.

Remember the conspiracy theorists talking about this for decades? I do. This is the goal of a bourgeois class of people who want to save their livelihoods and status in the world though don't want any circumstances they can't control - legislators are out of touch with the majority of people as they are funded by any really serve those bourgeois.

[dead]

The only baffling thing is taht it took this long.

In the physical world, we can limit the types of businesses. We can limit access to them. Casinos, adult entertainment, drinking establishments, etc require efort to go to and there's enforcement (not always effective, obviously) to keep, say, minors out.

The Internet has broken down that structure such that there are no limitations and, like it or not, that's really harmful. Widespread access to sports betting and crypto gambling is just a negative. There is nothing positive about this. Gambling preys on desperate people and gambling addiction quite often leads to suicide.

So I think it was inevitable that lawmakers would get involved. The only question now is what kinds of restrictions we get, how they work and what the enforcement mechanisms are. Some will say "this is a parenting issue". That's shown to be completely insufficient.

My point is that fighting this is (IMHO) a losing battle.

There are a lot of predictable outcomes here. For example, Meta thinks age verification should be enforced at the OS level. Shocker. The company that has no OS thinks OS should be responsible and, more importantly, liable.

IMHO private companies shouldn't be trusted with verifying IDs. The government should do that because, you know, they're the ones who issued the IDs.

I also think the minors simply shouldn't be able to create Apple or Google accounts. Child accounts should belong to an adult account and that adult is responsible for setting the age correctly. The child account should become an adult account when they turn 18.

Attacking VPNs, as Utah is doing here, is... a choice. I don't think that's a winning strategy but we will see.

I also think that location of a user is going to be increasingly enforced and verified. NVidia actually does something like this to try and block their cards being used in China. The cards will ping various locations to try and establish location. I think sites will start doing that too.

Take social media sites like Twitter, for example. There are obviously bots. But there are also people in developing nations who have figured out they can monetize being controversial. I think it would actually be value if we know that Debra the MAGA influencer is actually in Nigeria.

We will end with correct and desired behaviour. If you misbehave, you get internet ban, and lose your livelihood. Driving licences, passports, electricity, banking... etc already work this way.

Technical details are irrelevant.

You should not be able to criticise current or previous government!