Technology

The sort of morons who shouldn’t be using the internet anyway. I miss when the internet was for nerds.

also to monitor any left leaning activisim/dissidents , or associated agaisnt conservative governments.

I feel like you'd have to be a serious "hacker" kind of person to be anonymous on the internet.

Majority of people use their phone. I'm sure the government right now could tell who I actually am if they wanted to know. I wouldn't be surprised if someone on Lemmy could even figure it out.

Home WiFi?

Let me go sign up for a VPN with all my info...

I mean is it all really worth it?

I could be in the minority but I would rather watch tailored ads than hear another medication commercial.

Do I care that "they" know what kind of YouTube videos I watch? Do I even care what kind of porn I watch?

I am all for privacy and freedom don't get me wrong. I think we should fight.

But it does feel like we have lost the fight. What's wrong is we have to worry about what the government will do with that information.

We make a big deal about giving Pornhub our information but gladly hand it over to Amazon. Hell people would probably send in blood to get free 2-day shipping.

Terrifying once you realize what they really mean by “think of the children”

I discovered this recently, looks like a fairly promising beginning: https://reticulum.network/

A lot of the pieces are already there.

Decentralized, fast, light and performant, encrypted but not anonymous: Yggdrasil Decentralized, slow, obscured identity: I2P Multi-medium bridging: reticulum

For most of us, Yggdrasil solves the problem. Going decentralized takes power away from the techbros that made this shit possible in the first place. You stop using their services they aren’t going to be happy and will resist the regime that cost them money.

For spreading news that powerful people don’t wants spread, I2P. TOR has been compromised for years now. I2P isn’t perfect. It can be taken down from time to time and it’s slow as balls, but it’ll allow reporters to be safer and for any evidence to be distributed so wide they will never contain it all.

Reticulum will help users hop across multiple mediums and at this point could be usable for adapting lora stuff like meshtastic applications into the network too. It’s most useful for jumping across different modes of communication. Yggdrasil is likely going to outperform this but reticulum solves additional problems Yggdrasil itself cannot so they are both valuable.

Still unnecessary & less effective than less invasive alternatives that already exist & the government could promote. To quote another comment

Governments have commissioned enough studies to know that education, training, and parental controls filtering content at the receiving end are more effective & less infringing of civil rights than laws imposing restrictions & penalties on website operators to comply with online age verification. Laws could instead allocate resources to promote the former in a major way, setup independent evaluations reporting the effectiveness of child protection technologies to the public, promote standards & the development of better standards in the industry. Laws of the latter kind simply aren't needed & also suffer technical defects.

The most fatal technical defect is they lack enforceability on websites outside their jurisdiction. They're limited to HTTP (or successor). They practically rule out dynamic content (chat, fora) for minors unless that content is dynamically prescreened. Parental control filters lack all these defects, and they don't adversely impact privacy, fundamental rights, and law enforcement.

Governments know better & choose worse, because it's not about promoting the public good, it's about imposing control.

And because someone will probably ask, this is my understanding of how it would work for age verification (I am not an expert):

There are 3 parties in this scenario. The Estonian state, Meta, and a 3rd party (which is currently a real 3rd party, but work is being done to allow this to be a digital wallet on your device, that you control)

The state issues your 3rd party a magic cryptographic cert that has all your personal data like dob

Meta issue an age challenge: Not “what’s your dob” but rather “Are you old enough to use this service?”

3rd party show you exactly what Meta are requesting and give you the option to approve or deny the request

If you approve, the 3rd party generate a new cert that JUST says “Yes I’m of age” and nothing else.

Because it’s been generated from the states magic cert it can be verified with their public key.

Meta don’t get more info than they need, the state can’t see that you’ve logged into Meta, but you’ve successfully proved you’re old enough to use the service.

The current weak point is that the 3rd party can absolutely see all of it, but there’s no reason the 3rd party has to be an external service. It could absolutely be an app on your device.

You still need to prove yourself to the state, but you’d have to do that to get an id card in the first place. It’s WAAAAY better than trusting all the different porn sites and social media services individually to not leak or misuse your data

The problem is: you're assuming they're arguing in good faith when they say it's about pRoTeCtInG tHe ChIlDrEn. It's not. It's a pretext for the data grab and mass surveillance of everyone. They will gladly take your argument, claim age verification is compatible with privacy and anonymity, and then introduce age verification systems that do implement mass surveillance. Don't give them an inch.

Picasochu?

They people who wave away bombing a school and killing 175 because "it's war"(that we unilaterally started). These are definitely the people who you want to trust on child safety and well-being.

Also fuck reddit and fuck Spez

Fuck that

I assume you can still use a foreign VPN?

That's an interesting idea! Provides a level of abstraction, and maintains a semblance of privacy.