| ▲ | qnpnpmqppnp 2 hours ago |
| This title seems misleading. The EP paper appears to be highlighting the existence of a debate regarding VPN. Relevant quote: "Some argue that this is a loophole in the legislation that needs closing and call for age verification to be required for VPNs as well. In response, some VPN providers argue that they do not share information with third parties and state that their services are not intended for use by children in the first place. The Children's Commissioner for England has called for VPNs to be restricted to adult use only. While privacy advocates argue that imposing age-verification requirements on VPNs would pose significant risk to anonymity and date protection, child-safety campaigners claim that their widespread use by minors requires a regulatory response. Pornhub and other large pornography platforms have reportedly lost web traffic following the enforcement of age-verification rules in the UK, while VPN apps have reached the top of download rankings." Of course I'm not saying the EU won't regulate VPNs, but nowhere in this paper is "the EU" stating that VPNs need closing. |
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| ▲ | oytis an hour ago | parent | next [-] |
| These dimwits (and I don't just mean those in EU) seriously want to stop adolescents from watching porn, and are ready to mess with internet infrastructure for that. That's a depressing manifestation of aging society |
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| ▲ | chii 36 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | > seriously want to stop adolescents from watching porn no, they want to pretend this is the issue, so that pervasive monitoring or permission and/or deanonymization is normalized. It is to serve the state apparatus, rather than any actual protection. | | |
| ▲ | palata 32 minutes ago | parent [-] | | If it is possible to "pretend that they want something reasonable", it means that there is something reasonable somewhere. Maybe some want more control, but most certainly not everybody. > so that pervasive monitoring If you haven't gotten the memo, pervasive monitoring already exists. To sell ads. > or permission and/or deanonymization is normalized For age verification, it's possible to do it in a privacy-preserving manner. Now people spend their time complaining about the idea and claiming that all who disagree are extremists, so it doesn't help. But we could instead try to push for privacy-preserving age verification. | | |
| ▲ | ionwake 21 minutes ago | parent [-] | | guy on website called hackernews, tries to convince everyone more restrictions are good |
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| ▲ | eowln an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Practically all the ills we suffer currently are depressing manifestations of an aging society. That, and the lack of real issues to solve. | | |
| ▲ | ArnoVW 16 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Without thinking too hard I can name a few? The rise of authoritarianism? Inequality? Revival of geopolitical "realism"? Decrease in empathy and holistic thinking? Increasing willingness of the general population to engage in political adventurism? Accelerating resource consumption (and decelerating resource stocks). And if you consider none of those "real" problems, I know some people seem to have forgotten about it, but what about climate change? Given the half-life of CO2 and methane, that's a problem as "real" as they get. | |
| ▲ | AlecSchueler an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | If only we were all privileged enough to believe that the problems in the world today weren't real. | | |
| ▲ | eowln an hour ago | parent [-] | | I was talking about the first world. And yes, I think most if not all of the problems in the first world are gratuitously self-inflicted. | | |
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| ▲ | cess11 36 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It's not really about kids looking at porn, it's about tracking everyone else and making it easier for state surveillance and corporations to identify people. Kids don't have money and hardly ever manage to do crime without getting caught so they're profoundly uninteresting to surveil in this way, but adults are and here the interests of the state and corporations converge so they'll make a push for tyranny. But how to make people accept it? Tell them they want to expose kids to gruesome tentacle porn, or else they'd support this. Few adults are willing to admit they even look at porn, let alone argue that this is an important activity that needs to be protected, which it is. | | |
| ▲ | palata 27 minutes ago | parent [-] | | If you think that there is a need for new technology to identify people, I suggest you wake up and start getting informed about surveillance capitalism. There is absolutely no need for new technology to track people, it's there already. Also I feel like a big reason for age verification is social media. Many countries are trying to prevent kids from accessing social media (because we know it's bad for them), and age verification is the way to do that. Badly implemented, age verification is bad. But there are ways to implement it in a privacy-preserving manner, which wouldn't make the current state of surveillance capitalism worse. | | |
| ▲ | cess11 14 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Need is a very strong word. I'd call it a desire. Currently you can often identify people, sure, but there's hassle involved. What they want to do is to plug in a private corporation separate from whatever service that is likely to be more loyal with the state apparatus than the service, or else it is easily switched out for another. And corporations are having issues discerning bots from people without making access to their services a fuss or dependent on possibly idealistic and troublesome open source projects, like Anubis. It's truly, absolutely, not about "age verification". If it were about protecting kids from harm they'd take money from corporations post factum that are offending. Instead they're preparing to spend a lot of money. You could also look at who is heavily lobbying for this, you'll find it is fascist tech oligarchs from the US. They couldn't care less about kids except for obscene or profitable purposes. It would be weird for them to be cosy with epsteinian networks of power and at the same time be mindful about the wellbeing of children. |
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| ▲ | palata 35 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | Adolescents, or kids? Would you say it's completely stupid to want to stop kids from watching porn, or accessing social media? Did you grow up with free streaming platforms? Pretty sure many adolescents were accessing porn before those, though it was slightly less accessible. I personally don't have a definitive opinion about porn (I feel like young kids obviously shouldn't have access to it, but it shouldn't be illegal to adults, but I don't know where the limit should be), but I feel like making it harder for kids to access social media makes sense. | | |
| ▲ | oytis a minute ago | parent [-] | | I dunno, you have experience being a kid, right? Young kids are just not interested enough to look for porn, not to say figure out how to use VPN to access it. Lax restrictions like we have today are enough to stop porn from being forced on children who are not interested in it |
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| ▲ | rufasterisco an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The title is also the exact title for that paper’s chapter. You are right at pointing out that the paper is overall presenting the subject in a balanced manner, unfortunately it seems a bad choice was made when it came to that specific sentence, that gives a venue for it to be fed in the outrage machine. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/ATAG/2026/7826... |
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| ▲ | karmakurtisaani an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This needs a new "law of headlines": whenever it's the EU saying something, it's never the EU that said that. |
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| ▲ | sexylinux 32 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Showing children naked humans is a horrible crime. Bombing children is OK and we happily produce and deliver all the weapons needed for that. Patterns of an ill society. |
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| ▲ | shevy-java 42 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] |
| But you single out just one paper. If you include all paper and discussions the picture is super-clear, and the title is not misleading at all. This has to be said. > Of course I'm not saying the EU won't regulate VPNs The word choice is quite revealing. You write "regulate VPNs". To me this is not "regulation" at all - it is restriction or factually forbidding it. It is newspeak language here if we dampen it via nicer-sounding words. It also distracts from the main question: why the sudden attack by EU lobbyists against VPNs? |
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| ▲ | rounce 24 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | > why the sudden attack by EU lobbyists against VPNs? Live sports, they’re already assaulting internet infrastructure in various EU member states (eg. La Liga forcing Spanish ISPs to block cloudflare IPs during matches). With this in mind it seems less a case of surveillance state and more a case of corporate state capture. | |
| ▲ | qnpnpmqppnp 33 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | This is the only paper that is presented as a source for this statement. I'm not the one singling it out. |
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