As if social media == internet.
All a prelude to more walled gardens and more fees.
They care as much about the people who can’t verify as they do for the kids they proclaim to protect. UK age law restricts kids (and anyone who does not identify themselves) from seeing or discussing sensitive topics like Palestine. Given how the UK government has gone after Pro-Palestine activists, it makes sense why many of them might not want to identify themselves. If age verification was truly enforced worldwide it could stifle any and all discussions about sensitive topics. It’s like a child has been seriously hurt on the playground and their response is to child-proof every path, shop, road, park, forest trail and public space. It’s never been about the kids.
You don’t say…Stifling discussion is the feature not the bug.
The end goal is: Do anything we don’t want you to, and die.
So Servitors, without the tech helping you stay servile.
I feel like forcing kids to identify themselves online is just gonna allow predators to locate and exploit them easier. Which might be an unspoken motivation for some of the powerful people pushing these laws.
you can still access and participate in almost all non-porn forums without ID
stop lying
Porn has always been the canary in the coal mine.
Also, from my understanding, OSA in the UK requires ID for any site where people can talk and share videos and photos with each other. Urban Dead shut down because of it. I’m pretty sure the Fediverse servers running there are concerned about it. I’m curious to hear how they’ve been dealing with it?
And Texas and other many other states are planning to implement similar laws to OSA. Even with just the current laws, Texans can’t even access many porn sites because they just flat out block IPs from there to avoid any possible problems at all.
This carpet bombing strategy to protect the kids is going to destroy the Internet of old. Only major corporations with a team of lawyers and a war chest to deal with corporate-sized fines will be able to start a forum. And to protect their investment they will convince the government and the people that the Fediverse is dangerous. “The Pedoverse is where pedophiles, terrorists, racists, and other ‘mah freedomz’ freaks hang out. The only safe place to be is at Walmart Social Network. See plans starting at $9.99 a month*”
Okay how do you define porn? And would you host a forum that’s not porn but has to do with sex? Would you be willing to host it without an ID check risking fines and police visits?
Yesterday, I read that certain software packages on the NixOS Linux distribution cannot be used in the UK, because they require downloading from the Git provider repo.or.cz, which just flat-out bans any traffic from the UK due to the Online Safety Act.
I have a colleague with two kids, who’s actually not unhappy about *something* being done to try to prevent children from accessing the internet unfiltered. But that colleague is a huge fan of NixOS, too.
So yeah, oof, even before we get into the very concrete problems this article talks about, there’s a lot of nuance these laws need to get right.
“I have a colleague with two kids, who’s actually not unhappy about something being done to try to prevent children from accessing the internet unfiltered.”
You know I really hate this kind of bullshit. I question if it’s a psyop at this point. When I was in school, they had this censorship thing, it was a stupid fucking dog as their logo, very fitting with the current news. I taught my friends how to bypass it. This was grade school. And I was teaching them how to use proxies, we we’re just browsing the net so ignore security. Had the school IT call us out on this lol. I mean I started with using a 64 MB flash drive running whatever was the smallest linux version to realizing I could just run TOR off that flash drive.
Isn’t torrenting an option?
Not really. Maybe there’s a torrent of the source code somewhere, maybe as part of Debian or whatever. But you’d have to adjust the automatic build process to use the torrented source code. Certainly not impossible, but a pain.
If a workaround is introduced by NixOS itself, they could mirror the source code onto another Git provider, at least I saw that suggested in the discussion I stumbled across.
Side-note: I’m not from the UK myself. repo.or.cz just wasn’t reachable, from what looked like a denial of service attack or AI scrapers, that’s why I looked this up.
Although right now, I believe I can reach it fine, but get a wrong checksum for the source artifact, so hopefully they haven’t been hacked. 😵💫
Removed by mod
Bad news!
Is anything outside of reference material and news on the internet really worth visiting? I wasn’t really missing anything before social media became a thing. It’s just people arguing.
Everything has moved onto the internet so you can’t compare the 1990’s with today. Government services, businesses, there aren’t phone books anymore, you can’t find phone numbers of businesses without it. Products aren’t carried in stores anymore, or only at exorbitant prices because everyone buys them online. To just name a few things.
How do you think reference material and news gets written and distributed?
Reference material is often wikis or git repositories, which legally and technically are social media, so if you want those to exist, you want social media to exist.
News isn’t by itself social media, but social media helps significantly with following and discovering it. I get most of mine through Mastodon and Lemmy.
Glad I don’t live on Airstrip One. Where’s Amelia?
