I remember reading posts a decade or two ago on either Linode's forums or some other place like LinuxQuestions in broken English about tunneling through firewalls with ssh from I assume Chinese people.
I've started seeing posts like that from British people now. Absolutely wild. So much for the birthplace of common law.
The UK is where the US is headed if we don't grow a pair and snap out of this weak autocrat worshiping phase we seem to find ourselves in. It could happen so easily here.
Partisanship being the highest civic value in the US guarantees that we will not break out of that phase but will instead usher it in fully with two mildly different flavors. Coke and Pepsi autocracy with each insisting the other tastes like sewage and their own is ambrosia.
And yet so many look for the government to solve society’s ills, as if the “wrong government” will never ever take control. Perhaps we should all do more things for ourselves, and advocate for more laws that restrict what the government is allowed to do
This is a silly take. As soon as an authoritarian government takes power they just strip away the protections put in place to prevent abuse. The answer to preventing the "wrong" government from taking power is to have a strong "right" government.
This is a silly take. The answer to preventing one branch of the federal government from abusing power is to strengthen the other branches, and to strengthen federalism itself. Both are enshrined in the constitution and are the largest checks on growing executive power? In effect “weakening” any one part of the government.
The UK doesn’t have Texas or California or New York.
The UK has Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales. Scotland, particularly, is anti-authoritarian.
The only thing that kept Scotland from voting for independence was a promise the UK would stay in the EU. If the Scottish referendum was to happen today, I don’t think England would win their vote.
And leaving the EU has caused massive complications for the Good Friday agreement that specifically agreed to removing border controls between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.
Yet none of these countries were able to apply enough pressure to change the UK government’s downward spiral.
Looking at the current US, that seems to work not at all. The checks on power is only effective if enforced, and as there is no effort to enforce separation of powers, there are no checks.
This. The antidote to authoritarianism is a mobilized and motivated populace.
Liberals (small l) have spent 200 years being afraid of the masses and mass revolts, instead being enamored with pieces of paper that are supposedly holding everything up and keeping the forces of authoritarian reaction at bay.
A slim chance of getting outed for watching porn is more important to UK males than enforcing an age gate to stop kids having unlimited access. This is all that shows.
You're on hacker-news, so this is simple to explain;
Create a new flag in the http header that indicates under-age, and put heavy restrictions (and fines) on what content is allowed to be served as a response. Get this through to google, Mozilla, Microsoft, and apple as a device-wide parent-control feature. Universally enforced and legally backed parent control.
1. Simple to enforce
2. No major security issues
3. No risk of abuse as a surveillance or control mechanism.
4. No issue of "did not know user wasn't child" loophole if anyone is found in violation. If a child is still found on a adult website; it is entirely blamable on parent not running the parent control feature, or the website not respecting the flag.
This type of solution is proposed by the Russian state using special sim-cards for children under 14. Odd how the UK is the extreme one all of a sudden.
Instead we get;
1. Difficult to enforce effectively and easy to circumvent with rudimentary methods for those it actually affects.
2. Security nightmare to do correctly. (recent tea leak)
3. Easy excuse to ban any content the government disapproves
of. (wikipedia is now a adult site)
4. A normalization to hand out personal ID and photos to random websites.
5. A perfect excuse for authoritarian governments to implement something similar since "free and democratic nation did the same".
This is not about children. It is never about children. Banning encryption, collect all personal digital communication for review, and personally identify all people online. These three things are non-negotiable, regardless of motive. "protect the children" is easy to say, easy to make everyone agree with, easy to straw-man opponents into monsters. But whenever its used, we better make darn sure that's the real motive.
I would gladly back the first solution above. We need to protect children better, but this law is not about that.
Wikipedia is on the list of sites that the government is trying to force age verification on[1].
This isn't about people being scared they're going to be outed for watching porn. Even if the government honestly have no intentions to further restrict people's access to information, this is a genuine step towards authoritarian censorship.
I'm (somewhat hypocritically) not against purging 4chan & other sites that ferment dangerous right wing hatred from the internet, I am against anything that tries to limit or restrict access to legal content
As you said, that's a bit hypocritical. 4chan content is legal content, they're operating as a lawful company. In fact, they ban most ways to stay anonymous (tor, vpns, known proxies), so if you want to commit crimes, don't do it on 4chan.
Mandatory disclaimer that /pol/ is only one board, and most of 4chan is not actually politics.
I've started seeing posts like that from British people now. Absolutely wild. So much for the birthplace of common law.