Sometimes when you see your opponents getting out a ramp and a barrel of lube, you can call it a slippery slope.

Or alternatively - you could recognize that normal people are getting more and more pissed off by the fact that social media companies are force-feeding garbage into their kids eyeballs 16 hours a day.

We could give them a reasonable solution that demonstrably preserves privacy and doesn't inconvenience anyone else (Suppose you want to see all the uncensored everything, you open your new PC or phone and say your DOB is 1/1/1900. Done. Status quo.)

Or we could be alarmist about that, torpedo that plan, and then in 2 more years when people are even MORE pissed, a horrifying new plan comes out, where the government scans your photo ID (with the help of some crappy private contractor of course) and both of them promise to probably not store the info and log your access. And that one manages to scrape by because people are at that point even more pissed and are determined to solve the problem somehow.

The actual 'bad guys' just wouldn't be able to get the public support for that second, shitty plan, if we basically solve the problem now with this very modest plan that's on the table now. Parents can handle this simple one-time out-of-box prompt and it makes sense. Device owner, the parent, that's the one who should make the call.

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eterm 2 days ago | parent [-]

I actually agree with you, but you have an optimism about the ability for open source maintainers to have achievable political aims, in a way that I haven't seen happen for decades.

What your happier future looks like requires both a technical solution, but more importantly political wins to sell that solution as the better one.

The current operating systems weighted by users, are entirely under the control of three major players, who are incentivised to further centralise things.

( I'm counting the three operating systems as Google Play Services, IOS and Windows. Yes, AOSP exists, but it's useless without Google Play Services. ).

I also don't think a device level switch would stop anything for a second, given the number of stories of parents who seem to hand their children their credit card, then complain about them racking up thousands of dollars on Roblox or whatever.

When the light-touch measures fail, the framework will be leveraged to start requiring more centralised and less private solutions.

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xp84 2 days ago | parent [-]

> given the number of stories of parents who seem to hand their children their credit card, then complain about them racking up thousands of dollars on Roblox or whatever

Sure, but you hear about those because of how shocking they are to all sensible people. Actually I bet a lot more kids rack up those charges using cards they stole from mom's purse. Same kids will start trying to sneak mom's old iPhone out of the desk drawer to install "Adult TikTok" on. But again, this is not more concerning than the way my generation rooted around on the top shelf of Dad's closet to find the old Penthouse magazines.

I just don't accept the absolutist idea that if anything can be gotten around by any means, that means it can't still be sensible policy. Which seems to be the attitude taken by two separate groups -

1. Your and my common enemy -- the ones who are eager to enact "Show ID to access this site (trust us!)" verification schemes

2. And the freedom-loving hackers I've been arguing with today, who also detest those schemes but also don't want to see any scheme of any kind.

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eterm 2 days ago | parent [-]

> I just don't accept the absolutist idea that if anything can be gotten around by any means, that means it can't still be sensible policy

Now on that I agree strongly, there is a crowd on here that believe that technical weaknesses defeat political strengths, and focus all their effort into proving a technical workaround only for the political juggernauts to continue crushing their freedoms.

These are arguments which often flow, "This law is impossible to enforce in totality, therefore the law will fail", which fails to understand what law really is, and how much people abide to even bad laws.

I think we disagree on what's actually needed to defeat the increasing centralisation of the internet, I think it really needs a movement to wake people up, it needs skilled political operators, and it needs passionate orators, to spread the message that we're increasingly operating in a controlled space which every year has greater hurdles to communicate outside of the bounds which those who control it allow, rather than the open internet we used to enjoy and need to fight to defend.

And, most importantly, that that fight needs to be political and not technical. Being seduced by the appeal of technical solutions is unhelpful distraction. Cryptocurrency will not keep you free. Duress pins will not keep you free. It is political will that will do that.

	▲	xp84 19 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Hear, hear. I could even argue that the dearth of "skilled political operators" and "passionate orators" - at least excluding the ones that seem to be under exclusive contract to the Devil himself - is maybe the worst part of our current era. And it's widespread, and on multiple continents. We haven't seen the likes of Teddy Roosevelt, William Jennings Bryan, or FDR, or even JFK or LBJ, in a whole generation. Even a comparison to Richard Nixon, by any measure, makes every presidential candidate and congressional leader in the past 20 years look like buffoons and fools. Terms like "Debate" have become redefined as "Insulting and ranting past your opponents to get cheers out of your fans." No wonder we can't pass any policy that makes any sense with these jackasses in charge. And in case anyone wonders, on my list of skilled politicians above, I'm only old enough to have witnessed Nixon, so this is not a "back in my day" rant. It's a "it hasn't been ok since way before my day."