Maybe we'd have to contend with low bandwidth when we connect outside our own city network, using larger wavelength radio to bounce off the ionosphere across the planet.
As for the FCC, I don't really care. I will set up nodes on top of abandoned buildings. I will set up nodes in front of the local FCC field office. I will set up nodes in the middle of the forest. I will set up nodes on buoys out at sea. They may capture me or worse, so be it. I will not be around forever anyhow.
I pray there are still actual hackers out there on hacker news who might consider this idea and help further the technical side. This is a little out of my wheelhouse. I just can't accept this inevitable incoming future where all our communications will be IDed and censored. That is the end game for them. We can't allow for that to happen. This might be the biggest battle yet, bigger than all the other wars where power used us like pawns against the pawns of some other power, because for once in the history of civilization, we'd be fighting for our own right and not some elite group's right. I hope I am not alone in this line of thinking.
The obvious tradeoff was that we should have been able to have all forms of offensive and pornographic choices on the public airwaves, because we've given those who are concerned the tools to explicitly block it. (not that "unplugging the set when the parents weren't around" wasn't a viable tool already).
We never got that.
I do wonder how much of it is directly that the "won't someone think of the children" demographic is politically loud and courtable in and of itself, and how much of it has been fostered by firms that see it as a conduit for more nefarious aims (i. e. commercial social providers who want desperately for a legal CYA so they don't have to do the dance of COPPA compliance and have an incentive in the verified demographic details age attestation provides)
What are we talking about?
There are no laws that will turn out well.
I wonder why the rating code is so complex. Pornhub.com has this code enabled, but it also uses a simpler <meta name="rating" content="adult">. 4chan also uses the latter.
But it's all talk. Political pressure is like gas pressure. Gas expands to fill the available volume. What do you actually do to push back, besides talking about it on the web? This defines the available volume, if you don't do anything it's infinite.
Denial about requiring basic KYC is causing all sorts of perverse solutions. Accept the requirement so we can have a sensible technical solution.
- purchase an internet capable device for anyone under the age of 18 (or whatever age is deemed appropriate to allow unfettered access without any ID)
- allow anyone under the age of 18 (or ##) to operate a device connected to the internet
That removes the government's attempted false flag operations to use "children's access to the internet" as the excuse to obtain the right to monitor every second of your online activity for the rest of your life.
And simultaneously likely saves our children's brains.
Edit: Hyperbole is an easy accusation. But the concept is straight forward:
If the internet is so dangerous as to require everyone to have government issued ID to get online, then change the law preventing smartphones and other internet mobile devices to be possessed by children. That's easy to do.
Put the burden on parents where it belongs to monitor their children in their own homes just as they do as gun owners (required to use gun lockers etc). If you are ok with your 10 year old being in his/her room online without you monitoring, then imo that's probably child abuser, but hey, go for it.
I will certainly teach my kids everything I know about exploiting and destroying enemy computer systems.
This is the equivalent of the 2nd Amendment, but for the Internet space. You should absolutely be able to inspect, disassemble, debug, everything you can in a computer system and have the knowledge to knock it down, if it (or its owner) starts misbehaving.
Literally every single problem with computer system can be solved if the entire population, armed with simple Kali Linux, decides to strike back against the tyranny of the government
By the way, I'm sure that they are aware of all this privacy-first counter-tracking sentiment from certain communities, and are actively working to subvert it.
I will forever keep trying to communicate without anyone else being able to read it. You can't ban my ability to use math to encrypt things. Still, the thought police keeps popping up. They can drag me to jail. I am a good person, a father, but my thoughts are my own. (just kidding, I'll give up all my s* when they actually drag me away from my family, but maybe I'll let them drag me for some meters for the show, to make a point, and hope people are filming it.)
There are things like Ham radio and meshtastic (uses lora). It's all slow of course (atm).
Essentially it’s encrypted internet/networking over any type of network including LoRa.
Issue is the size of the community and linking up to actually serve internet or surface public services there.
It's really slow, but its private.
This btw actually happen: "Sesame Scheme: Unintended Consequences of Allergen Food Labeling"( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44074487 )
The geeks would likely be the elite class force to tumble it if it ever became necassary I reckon.
>That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
The title "for the children" is tongue-in-cheek. It's not serious.
[1] - https://www.tinc-vpn.org/
[2] - https://www.linode.com/docs/guides/how-to-set-up-tinc-peer-t...
The router must then be configured to only allow Squid HTTPS, Unbound DNS and Chrony NTP out to the internet.
Doing this will of course break things like video games. The parents should have a way to bypass Squid and permit all traffic out during family video game time.
[1] - https://github.com/alatas/squid-alpine-ssl Not my repo, needs updating
https://www.w3.org/2023/Talks/0727-wearedevelopers-tbl/solid...
Now we’re onto AI, so we have suboptimal age verification, with implementations in law written by politicians
At the moment what we have is no good in my opinion. What we have at the moment will put the identification information of both children and adults at risk. Children can not even consent to sharing this data thus the only people that could protect them are their parents.
Not addressing to you specifically, just figure of speech
Now lets bring them all to the family friendly farm where they can watch a horse with a monster dong screw his way through a herd of mares.
The hyperbole is getting a little out of control.
> - allow anyone under the age of 18 (or ##) to operate a device connected to the internet
I don't understand how anyone can think that keeping kids entirely away from internet-connected devices through age 17 is possible or a good idea. These aren't serious comments or suggestions.
Version control the laws.
Compare the laws with all other countries.
Hoard data.
Write code to replace government employees and to make laws easy to implement. (If done well consider selling a product or service)
Make everything modular so that the establishment can steal it.
Get people involved. Doesn't matter if you need to write a sim and convince them it is a game.
Pretend the whole exercise is writing code so that you can imagine you are perfect for the job.
I learn that people from all political angles like the idea of voluntary taxes (but no one believes it can work)
If the whole thing can run on donations and volunteers with a few "state" owned companies a hot swap becomes inevitable.
You have full control over your router and kid's devices so start there. Not anyone else's responsibility.
I see many arguments claiming it's about mass surveillance and an invasion of privacy and so on.
We already have mass surveillance, so I don't really buy into those arguments.
I think it's worth considering that it is actually about control. Or more precisely, that it's about dissuading citizens from using social media in the first place.
The damage done to our western democracies from misinformation spread via social media has not gone unnoticed...
Technology is what has always precipitated political change
Lovebugs are visible and land on their arm.
Try explaining WHY the bugs are connected…
Don't blame me. Blame the people pushing for a government ID that YOU must have before you can order your pizza.
I remember reading someone argue that anytime you see a claim that we need to do something to protect democracy just replace the word democracy with bureaucracy and then the statement makes sense.
1. Eliminate all the false flag attempts by governments and their supporters to use "danger to children" to require government ID for every adult to get online.
2. If the internet is so dangerous as to require ID to get online, then change the law preventing smartphones and other internet mobile devices to be possessed by children. That's easy to do. Put the burden on parents where it belongs to monitor their children in their own homes just as they do as gun owners.
Giving a kid Instagram and tiktok is like handing them over to a junkie on the street to try meth.
I don't love disenfranchising voters but I think it's probably better than allowing elections to be vulnerable to foreign tampering, don't you think?
For the longer explanation, see: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37366751>.
That said, legitimacy is a political property, and one which cannot be attained through purely technical means. To that extent I agree with your critique.
If enough people want something badly enough, when existing governing structures will bow is a question of how many people.
You should pretend your code isn't good enough. That way you can own the problem. You will get plenty of help from those making things worse. Empires crumble eventually.
Farewell to freedom on the Internet and the days of wild abandon.
Law makers wouldn't need to pretend they are doing something unique.
You might do the same with all infrastructure projects. They can't all be cheap. Half should more expensive than average. It should be fascinating to see where the extra money is going.
Some goes towards corruption, some into incompetence but there should also be plenty of praise worthy efforts.
It seems we have the tools to do such things now without breaking the bank.
Think of the law as a truly outdated code base. Why would you do a rewrite you ask? Because we've learned a thing or two along the way?
This thread is about stopping the insanity of uploading and ultimately leaking PII of families before the kids can even consent to it. Kids will despise their parents if they could have stopped this and did not. They will absolutely appreciate their parents for protecting them from predatory companies.
If we must pursue these predatory practices of colluding companies and governments then both of them need to be under stricter technical and audit requirements than PCI DSS and Fedramp.
And yes, I think we likely will see social media become segmented so hostile nations will be blocked from posting on local social media. Or at least having them flagged as foreign accounts.
It’s a theory for sure.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillotine
Wind the clock back a few hundred years and there was plenty of legitimate non-government violence. The government didn't care if the well to do dueled, the townsfolk brawled in the bar, a serial fraudster got what was coming to them, etc, etc. Sure the government could choose to care and construe it's written rules to that effect if it chose but other than exceptional situations it largely didn't and everyone alive then considered this fine.
Wind the clock back further to medieval times and it gets even messier.
The problem in your initial proposal comes in the first step: "Create a government from scratch". That is a political process at best; at worst, one predicated on violence (rebellion, insurrection, coercion).
Again, the solution is inherently political, not technical. There might be technical elements to such a political process, but those follow from rather than lead to.
This represents a significant shift in my own views over the past 20 years or so. In the 1990s I would have tended to agree with you. I no longer do.
It would be good. There have been some attempts at source code style revision management for statutes (such as https://www.lafabriquedelaloi.fr/ ). Are they a useful start? What should be the next step?
Banning it outright means parents have a strong foundation of “no you can’t have it, it’s illegal” and all of their peers will instead organise on private messaging apps instead.
The psychological impacts come from secondary network effects. The studies suggest that taking social media away from just your kid doesn't do anything, because the culture wherever they go will still be driven by it.
So the only way I can protect my kids from it is to pass laws to force other parents' hands.
Another option of course is to force all these companies and their age/ID vendors to be under something much stricter than PCI DSS and Fedramp for their entire data-centers as a starting point if we must allow storing PII data of children and their parents.
It's that, to the level of a thought-stopping cliche, the definition is misstated with the emphasis on violence rather than legitimacy, which misses the whole point.
But Weber's claim is also nuanced:
- Non-government violence, if tolerated by the government, is then sanctioned by the government, and hence, government retains its monopoly on legitimacy. Again, the relevant monopoly is legitimacy. Not on who is acting with violence, but who finds that violence legitimate or illegitimate.
- Governmental violence, if deemed illegitimate by the population, means that the government no longer has legitimacy itself, and hence by Weber's definition is no longer a government (at least by his terms).
- If some other entity holds legitimacy over violence within a given area (say, a neighboring state, a local warlord, Great Power, partisan or resistance movement, corporate or commercial entity such as, say, the British East India Company), then that entity is effectively the government, again, by Weber's definition. As an example, Mohandas Gandhi's ahimsa movement successfully challenged British imperial rule not by claiming violence for itself, but by successfully claiming the principle of nonviolence. The Empire was delegitimated in the process.
- And finally, if no one institution can successfully claim legitimacy of violence within a region, then there is no government. The region is effectively stateless.
There may well be other constructs, situations may be fluid (changing with time or over space), effective control units may be small (city-states, tribes), etc.., but you can generally find a Weberian projection in such cases.
Again, I've raised this point numerous times on HN, largely due to the widespread misrepresentation of Weber. Often, I suspect, by people who have no idea that they're employing a corrupted version of his definition in the first place. I encourage you to look through my earlier discussions to see if your further objections aren't already addressed there: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...>.
Prior discussion points to where the misleading restatement seems to have originated, more on the elements of Weber's definition as applied to various situations, Weber's original work, and translation into English which didn't occur until the 1950s, followed shortly by the bastardised variant taking hold.
I also strongly recommend British political historian David Runciman's own views on this definition, which I'd first encountered well after forming my own. They're expressed in this episode of his podcast Talking Politics: <https://play.acast.com/s/history-of-ideas/weberonleadership> (at about 15 minutes).
For you yes. If you were a song writer I would suggest you write something like El Pueblo Unido Jamás Será Vencido in stead of a new shaking my ass song.
You do what you know. It's much less of a waste of time if it progresses your skills.
A baker in 1683 created the croissant to symbolize eating the ottoman empire.
Did he make a relevant contribution? I honestly don't know.
Last but not least, it is to maintain this website, last updates seem to be from 2022. But I can't manage to imagine if it's a lot of work or not.
Bro… it’s joever for you
I sympathize with the libertarian impulse but for me, protecting my kids from other parents' poor decisions comes first.