Nice.
Mastodon says it doesn't 'have the means' to comply with age verification laws
Submitted 7 months ago by General_Effort@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
Comments
drmoose@lemmy.world 7 months ago
moonburster@lemmy.world 7 months ago
If a government wants this in place, they should also facilitate the means.
cley_faye@lemmy.world 7 months ago
I think that was the point. Not only decentralized services, but a lot of small and/or individual services too. The way age verification is done is both stupid, and expensive. Only the big names will remain.
iii@mander.xyz 7 months ago
Only the big names will remain.
BigMacHole@sopuli.xyz 7 months ago
We NEED to Protect The Children which is WHY we’re SO LUCKY to have a President who is SO KEEN to PROTECT Child Rapists like Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell!
jaschen306@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
Protect Jeffrey Epstein? Last I checked, he doesn’t need anymore “protecting”.
Trump only cares about himself. If he accidentally “protected” anyone but himself, it’s purely a coincidence.
VampirePenguin@lemmy.world 7 months ago
I don’t see how Mississippi or the UK think they can issue laws on sites hosted outside their jurisdiction. That’s just mind boggling. The onus is on the state to provide age verification, or make their ISPs do it.
cley_faye@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Watch the whole world go “ahaha age verification go brrrrr” in the next months/years, and we’ll talk again. I’m particularly baffled at the EU that was all “privacy friendly, consumer first” until a handful of month ago.
carrylex@lemmy.world 7 months ago
“You have no power here” - Some server hosted on a satellite (probably)
Aimeeloulm@feddit.uk 7 months ago
No, it’s upto the individuals to police their or their childrens internet usage, have family computer in place they can monitor, children should have special childrens phones that are locked down with parents configuring it, today parents are abdicating responsibility, leaving schools to feed, potty train, how to clean teeth and how to behave.
Whats next expecting schools to provide beds and rooms to sleep in, soon babies will be handed to state and raised by the state, is it any wonder we now have a nanny state in many countries, people are getting lazy and filthy, spitting in streets, peeing and pooping in streets, dumping rubbish in streets 😡
madcaesar@lemmy.world 7 months ago
The one compromise I’d like to see is for sites to have to provide keywords like in the robot.txt file that says what they serve. So let’s say a site provides porn or gore and a parent wants to block access to it, it should be a simple toggle on the router or browser or both.
Anything beyond that is just bullshit
downhomechunk@midwest.social 7 months ago
Sorry, the sort of individualism you speak of only applies to opting out of vaccines and praying to jeebus in the classroom.
HiTekRedNek@lemmy.world 7 months ago
This is exactly the kind of government overreach people like me have been screaming about since, in my case, the 1990s.
“I told you so” just doesn’t feel so good when what’s happening is nothing less than the entirety of human freedom and liberty is being eroded before our very eyes, and those who disagree with it get labeled as kooks, and accused of hating whatever “oppressed group” of the day is in vogue.
hector@lemmy.today 7 months ago
Plus no one I have warned from 97 on admits to remembering my warnings. Them all saying nah keep your head down and live, govt has always been bad, nothing will fundamently change.
The same people still support establishment opposition to save us too, following the lead of authorities passing the buck and never admitting a mistake and correcting their behavior.
BangCrash@lemmy.world 7 months ago
You’ve been screaming about internet censorship since before the internet?
Fucking time traveller right here
SmilingSolaris@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Brother, delete this silly comment and be a nicer person. Please, there is still time!
HiTekRedNek@lemmy.world 7 months ago
… I was online in 1993, bro. I was dialing into BBSs with worldwide fidonet bulletin boards even earlier than that.
Don’t be such a dipshit.
ammonium@lemmy.world 7 months ago
What are you talking about? The internet existed all through the 90s
Gutless2615@ttrpg.network 7 months ago
I’m so so very tired of being right.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 7 months ago
have you tried being intentionally and absurdly wrong?
General_Effort@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Yes. I had always worried about the copyright industry. That was the big money pushing for censorship. Controlling access and exchange of information is part of their business model and even personal ideology. But I don’t know how much this has actually to do with them, and how much is simply the will to power.
What I did not see coming at all was how the left would completely 180 on these issues. That, at least, I blame on the copyright industry.
Right wing people have screeched about “the intolerant left” forever, but I always ignored the obvious hypocrisy. I took it as a debate on what is permissible in polite society. But now Europe is at a point where there is simply a consensus against free speech. Only the most illiberal forces will be able to use these legal weapons to full effect. That will be the extreme right.
sqgl@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
The ideal of free speech is a naive fantasy especially with social media which can amplify the craziest of ideas which can go viral.
HiTekRedNek@lemmy.world 7 months ago
It’s just a logical extension of what happens when government becomes the arbitrator of all.
The biggest issue is that so many people see it just as you do, left vs right, instead of liberty vs authoritarianism.
For decades, the libertarian movement, as seen by the left, has been largely associated with the right, simply because of their professed support of the free market, and dislike of gun control
But that same movement has been seen by the right as largely associated with the left, because of their views on things like the drug war, enforced morality, and anti-corporatism.
Has there been a large shift of alt-right into the libertarian movement over the past few years? Yes. Absolutely. And I despise it with a passion.
But there are still quite a lot of us truly anti-authoritarian libertarians out there who despise both left, and right leaning authoritarianism.
But when I bring up issues of authoritarianism, I get “BoTh SiDeS?!” bullshit responses. Because YES, as we can see, BOTH SIDES do their own fair share of this anti-authoritarian bullshit.
They differ in methods, yes. But the bottom line is an encroachment on personal privacy. Property rights are a logical extension of personal privacy rights.
sunbeam60@lemmy.ml 7 months ago
I too have been screaming about private online since the 90s. I have an intuitive reaction that sort of mirrors yours.
But can I ask you a question?
And it’s one that I’m asking because I genuinely wish to learn from others.
Because I can’t quite see the difference and maybe there’s something I’m missing.
Why is it not government overreach to ensure pornography isn’t sold to minors in an adult video store, but government overreach to have the same expectation of online pornography providers?
I would love your enlightened view on this so I can learn from it. Because I can’t quite see the difference.
I understand that many adults go into an adult video store and need not prove their age, because they clearly look like adults.
And so the difference here is that everyone have to prove their age online, even people that are clearly adults by how they look.
But entering a pornography website is the equivalent of entering an adult video store where the clerk cannot see you, cannot hear your voice. In that world I would also expect the clerk to check every purchase as they would have no other means of assessing the buyer’s age.
Or maybe you think that adult videos should be sold to everyone and it’s the very concept that pornography is restricted to minors that you disagree with. I don’t personally hold that view but then I can least understand why you would also reject online age verification.
Or maybe you think it is ineffective and won’t make a difference. That argument I most definitely agree with, but how we choose to implement a law, and whether it’s effective, is two different discussions I would posit.
AeonFelis@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Funny - I assume on one here was actually involved in creating the law that requires identification when buying pornography (or alcohol. Or tobacco) at stores, but we are all considered responsible for it to the point we are hypocrite if we object a similar law?
If someone says they are against that law now, years after it’s already established and spread, it won’t be taken as “I’m generally against the government limiting our freedom to consume what we want” but as “I want to push children to consume porn/alcohol/tobacco”. So no one argues against these laws. But it’s much more feasible to argue against the new laws - a ship that’s still in the port.
30 years from now, when they make the law that neural implants must detect illegal thoughts in the users’ biological brains and block them, you’d make the argument that it’s not fundamentally different than blocking the same topics on the internet - a practice that, by that time, will already be accepted by the general populace.
BangCrash@lemmy.world 7 months ago
People complained about government overreach when seatbelts became a law
AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 7 months ago
There is no possible way to actually stop teenagers accessing online porn that doesn’t require such a massive invasion of privacy that it leaves no safe way for adults to access it. To go with your adult video store analogy, it’s like if the store staff would have to accompany you home and watch you watching the porn to check there wasn’t anyone standing behind you also looking at the screen, and while they were there, they were supposed to take notes on everything they saw. Even if they had no interest in doing anything nefarious, a criminal could steal their notebook and blackmail all their customers with the details it contained, and there’d be enough proof that there wouldn’t be any way to plausibly claim the blackmailer had just made everything up.
If you want to prove someone on the Internet is a real adult and not a determined teenager, you need lots of layers. E.g. if you just ask for a photo of an ID card, that can be defeated by a photo of someone else’s ID card, and a video of a face can be defeated by a video game character (potentially even one made to resemble the person whose ID has been copied). You need to prove there’s an ID card that belongs to a real person and that it’s that person who is using it, and that’s both easier to fake than going to a store with a fake ID (if you look young, they’ll be suspicious of your ID) or Mission Impossible mask, and unlike in a store, the customer can’t see that you’re not making a copy of the ID card for later blackmail or targeted advertisements. No one would go back to a porn shop that asked for a home address and a bank statement to prove it.
Another big factor is that if there’s a physical shop supplying porn to children, the police will notice and stop it, but online, it’s really easy to make a website and fly under the radar. It’s pretty easy for sites that don’t care about the law to provide an indefinite supply of porn to children, and once that’s happening, there’s no reason to think that it’s only going to be legal porn just being supplied to the wrong people.
Overall, the risk of showing porn to children doesn’t go down very much, but the risk of showing blackmailable data to criminals and showing particularly extreme and illegal porn to children goes up by a lot. Protecting children from extreme material, e.g. videos of real necrophilia and rape, which are widely accepted to be seriously harmful, should be a higher priority than protecting a larger number from less extreme material that the evidence says is less harmful, if at all. Even if it’s taken as fact that any exposure to porn is always harmful to minors, the policies that are possible to implement in the real world can’t prevent it, just add either extra hassle or opportunities for even worse things to happen. There hasn’t been any proposal by any government with a chance of doing more good than harm.
6nk06@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
Because I can’t quite see the difference
Parents can (and MUST) monitor what happens in their home. It was expected for the past thousand years, and now it’s the duty of everyone to take care of anyone’s children for some reason. To get to a porn store, you need money to take the bus or you need a car, then the owner of the store can kick your ass or call the cops if you’re underage. Remember that less than 50 years ago, the local priest could smash your face if you didn’t behave properly in the street, With the internet, parents are the sole responsible for what their kids do, but they don’t want to take any responsibility for it. The solution would be a mandatory parental control on every computer, but parents wouldn’t like that.
government overreach to have the same expectation of online pornography providers
Because that overreach happens to remove all my privacy thanks to a few idiot parents who don’t want to do their parenting jobs in another country, and I consider that unacceptable.
General_Effort@lemmy.world 7 months ago
But entering a pornography website is the equivalent of entering an adult video store where the clerk cannot see you, cannot hear your voice.
There’s the problem. I was tempted to call this Boomer logic, but that would extremely unfair to Boomers. We are only seeing this now, that the Boomers are on the way out.
I think the Boomers understood better how this works. It’s not like entering a store. It’s like making a phone call to the store, and the store may be on the other side of the world. The Boomers understood borders, long distance calls, international mail.
Now the digital natives are taking over. And they understand nothing beyond tapping and swiping.
Spoilered is a post I wrote earlier. Just so you know what’s coming.
spoiler
The problem is that meat-space logic is applied to the cyberspace (as it might have been said in the 90ies). You go into a store and the clerk sees you and knows your age. If it’s borderline, then they ask for ID. They are applying that thinking to internet services. Where this falls down is that no ordinary Mastodon instance can comply with the regulations of the close to 200 hundred countries in the world. Of course, just like 4chan, many wouldn’t want to out of principle. The only way to make this work is to introduce another meat-space thing: Border posts. You need a Great Firewall of the [Local Nation]. At physical border posts, guards check if goods comply with local regulations. We need virtual border posts to check if data is imported and exported in compliance with local regulations. Such a thing, a virtual Schengen border, was briefly considered in the EU about 15 years ago. It went nowhere at the time. But if you look at EU regulations, you can see that the foundations are already laid, most obviously with the GDPR but also the DSM, DMA, DSA, CRA, … Eventually, the border will be closed to protect our values; to enforce our laws. We will lock out those American and Chinese Big Tech companies that steal our data. We will only allow their European branches and strictly monitor their communications abroad. We will be taking back control, as the Brexiteers sloganized it. Freedom is just another word for having to ask the government for permission when you enter a country. And increasingly, it is another word for having to ask permission for how you use your own computer. It won’t be some shady backroom deal. Look here. People in this community love these regulations. Europeans here are happy to tell US companies to “FO if they don’t want to follow our laws”. Well, the Great Firewall of Europe is how you do that. lemmy.world/comment/19119670
HiTekRedNek@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Parents have the ultimate say-so of what their kids have access to.
I don’t believe there needs to be a law that says that, no.
If a parent decides their kid is responsible enough to have their own money, then it’s the parents who are to blame if that kid buys “bad” things with that money.
Same thing online. If a parent decides their kid is responsible enough to have unrestricted internet access, then it’s their fault if the kid then goes to a “bad” website.
It’s not the store’s fault. Nor is it the website’s fault.
We have given away far too much of our parental responsibility over to 3rd parties, and now we don’t know how to parent anymore.
abbiistabbii@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 months ago
I live in the UK, and this is something I was saying about the Online Safety Act. It puts all the onus on the websites and not only do some websites not have the money or resources to comply, but with something like Mastodon, it doesn’t really work. Like this bill was written and passed by people who don’t know shit about fuck about tech. Several Lemmy and Mastodon instances have shut down/Geoblocked the UK because of this, and other jurisdictions don’t seem to understand that either.
plyth@feddit.org 7 months ago
but with something like Mastodon, it doesn’t really work. Like this bill was written and passed by people who don’t know shit about fuck about tech. Several Lemmy and Mastodon instances have shut down/Geoblocked the UK because of this
So they knew what they were doing. Age verification is about removing all sources that can’t be controlled.
abbiistabbii@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 months ago
and yet they’re doing a fucking terrible job at it (source, I’m using a VPN, something people in the Lords didn’t even know was a thing until it was too late). It would be funny if it wasn’t my reality.
SethTaylor@lemmy.world 7 months ago
It’s almost like this law was made to preserve the Meta monopoly.
AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 7 months ago
They consulted with MindGeek, who own Pornhub etc… They’re one of the few companies big enough to comply. It was designed to preserve their monopoly, not Meta’s. The politicians voting on it didn’t necessarily understand that, but the law had been approved by children’s charities and (a single representative of) the industry, so there’d be no reason (if you didn’t understand how technology works) to question it.
General_Effort@lemmy.world 7 months ago
What gets me is how many people in this very community have the same level of ignorance. And on top of that, they don’t understand that these laws also apply to the very service they are using.
brachiosaurus@mander.xyz 7 months ago
If you know anyone who support age verifications laws remind them that the same governments that care so much about kids is backing and arming israel to murder and starve kids to death.
aesthelete@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Yes but that would require them to regard all children as being worthy of protection by the law.
They don’t.
UltraBlack@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Kids of Families who chose to stay despite efforts to evacuate them 👍
starman2112@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
Oh yeah just pack up and move! What an easy solution! Why didn’t the Jews think of that back in the 30’s and 40’s? They could have ended the holocaust all on their own by simply leaving!
pogmommy@lemmy.ml 7 months ago
If I wanted you I was gonna steal your house, and you didn’t leave, you’d be okay with your children being murdered? You’re fucking nuts
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 7 months ago
Please leave, your voice is not wanted here.
DancingBear@midwest.social 7 months ago
Fucking creepy comment.
are you suggesting the Palestine government does not have a right you exist you antisemitic troll
nyan@lemmy.cafe 7 months ago
No effort could have evacuated the entire population of Gaza without free movement across land borders. It was never a practical option.
Even if it had been, parents making a dumbass decision doesn’t justify killing their kids.
Agent641@lemmy.world 7 months ago
That’s far too many words for them to properly understand
pastermil@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
Then let me summarize:
care 'bout kids? gaza kids?
A_norny_mousse@feddit.org 7 months ago
“there is nobody that can decide for the fediverse to block Mississippi.” (…)
“And this is why real decentralization matters,” said Rochko.
Blackmist@feddit.uk 7 months ago
If it’s a law, it should be free for both businesses and users.
tabular@lemmy.world 7 months ago
That means being paid by the tax payers.
The free option is to trust your children.
abbiistabbii@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 months ago
The better option would be to have Parental controls on by default and inform parents/customers about how to turn them on for their kid’s devices. They won’t do that because some people have investments in YOTI and Data Brokers want our data.
MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 7 months ago
NSFW tag and parental controls blocking that is not enough?
Blackmist@feddit.uk 7 months ago
Oh noes, won’t somebody think of the blessed tax payers.
Thedogdrinkscoffee@lemmy.ca 7 months ago
Hey, UK! When you are being compared to Mississippi, you are fucking up very very badly.
defaultusername@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 months ago
Lucky for Mastodon anx other ActivityPub projects, they don’t need to host any servers. People outside of regions where age verification is required can host the servers instead.
smnwcj@fedia.io 7 months ago
This does come with a (maybe trivial) cost for those hosts of not being able to enter the UK.
cmgvd3lw@discuss.tchncs.de 7 months ago
But what if govt block the site hosted outside? And the VPNs require you to do an age verification?
defaultusername@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 months ago
Good luck blocking Tor or I2P.
SeductiveTortoise@piefed.social 7 months ago
Government sets up page to verify age. You head to it, no referrer. Age check happens by trusted entity (your government, not some sketchy big tech ass), they create a signed cert with a short lifespan to prevent your kid using the one you created yesterday and without the knowledge which service it is for. It does not contain a reference to your identity. You share that cert with the service you want to use, they verify the signature, your age, save the passing and everyone is happy. Your government doesn't know that you're into ladies with big booties, the big booty service doesn't know your identity and you wank along in private.
But oh no, that wouldn't work because think of the... I have no clue.
monk@lemmy.unboiled.info 7 months ago
Oh, it will work fine, as soon as it issues it’s first cert without any reference to the identity, it wouldn’t even be needed until it’s expiry. But it’s easier to just not build it.
Humanius@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Funnily enough that is roughly the implementation the EU seems to be working on.
SeductiveTortoise@piefed.social 7 months ago
I think I have to specify what I mean by trusted. I do not trust them with my browser history, but I do trust them handling my government-issued identity. I do however not trust a company with that identity because I know they will definitely use it for their own good. What I want is the complete and absolute separation of information. Everyone knows exactly what they need to know, not a byte more. I'm still not convinced we desperately need the possibility to identify us for every fucking service though. Keeping kids from accessing porn should be the task of the parent. Keeping kids out of porn, yes indeed, we all need to tackle that problem.
starman2112@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
You sell that cert to a local kid for $50
You generate another cert to sell to a local kid tomorrow
???
Profit
SeductiveTortoise@piefed.social 7 months ago
And your solution is...?
General_Effort@lemmy.world 7 months ago
The problem is that meat-space logic is applied to the cyberspace (as it might have been said in the 90ies).
You go into a store and the clerk sees you and knows your age. If it’s borderline, then they ask for ID. They are applying that thinking to internet services. And so are you. You are just trying to figure out a better way to ask for ID.
The UK doesn’t have a system of mandatory national ID. Brits feel that that is totalitarian. So obviously, they do not use the scheme you propose. It’s not their meat-space logic.
Where this falls down is that no ordinary Mastodon instance can comply with the regulations of the close to 200 hundred countries in the world. Of course, just like 4chan, many wouldn’t want to out of principle.
The only way to make this work is to introduce another meat-space thing: Border posts. You need a Great Firewall of the [Local Nation]. At physical border posts, guards check if goods comply with local regulations. We need virtual border posts to check if data is imported and exported in compliance with local regulations.
Such a thing, a virtual Schengen border, was briefly considered in the EU about 15 years ago. It went nowhere at the time. But if you look at EU regulations, you can see that the foundations are already laid, most obviously with the GDPR but also the DSM, DMA, DSA, CRA, …
Eventually, the border will be closed to protect our values; to enforce our laws. We will lock out those American and Chinese Big Tech companies that steal our data. We will only allow their European branches and strictly monitor their communications abroad. We will be taking back control, as the Brexiteers sloganized it. Freedom is just another word for having to ask the government for permission when you enter a country. And increasingly, it is another word for having to ask permission for how you use your own computer.
It won’t be some shady backroom deal. Look here. People in this community love these regulations. Europeans here are happy to tell US companies to “FO if they don’t want to follow our laws”. Well, the Great Firewall of Europe is how you do that.
ItsGhost@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
Because think of the shareholders, I’m waiting to see which politicians spouses own controlling shares in the verification companies…
SeductiveTortoise@piefed.social 7 months ago
That's the reason I don't want that for profit. What could it cost in additional taxes? 5 cents?
just_an_average_joe@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 months ago
How about people parent their children?
I believe the issue is that parents themselves are overworked from their job and have no energy to be a parent, because in our society, it is more successful to be a worker than to be a parent.
(Sorry for turning it into a critique of capitalism, I just can’t help it these days)
rozodru@piefed.social 7 months ago
meh just do what Amazon does "Hey if you're student you can get Amazon Prime for $5! how old are you?"
me: "I'm 20."
Amazon: "Ok here's your cheap prime!"
/me groans getting out of the chair cause I'm in my 40s
Point being just slap up an unverified age gate and be done with it. Really, truthfully, whose going to actually check? who even cares to check? it's all just a dog and pony show to please the conservative and "think of the children" religious nut jobs who have no idea how any of this shit works anyways. Just spend 2 minutes whipping up a site with a centered div that has a drop down menu asking "how old are you?" less than 18 send it to a "no internet for you page" greater than 18 "go look at porn" page.
Doesn't take a rocket scientist to know what's REALLY happening that they're requiring scanned IDs or faces or what have you. and no company in their right mind is going to fight this as it's free and easy data collection. Bluesky doesn't give a flying fuck as they're just going to end up selling the data they collect.
brachiosaurus@mander.xyz 7 months ago
It was never about the kids.
fodor@lemmy.zip 7 months ago
Right, except for the part where you get verified and nobody can do that except you. Oh, and the part where your kids don’t steal a copy. Or a copy of someone else’s verification. And the part where it actually doesn’t contain references to your real identity; easy to fuck that one up, right… Hmm, that actually means the whole thing wouldn’t work.
GreenShimada@lemmy.world 7 months ago
It bothers me so much that a ZKP system is entirely possible, and no one will just do the first step of setting that up.
tabular@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Age check happens via trustest entity (your government)
Bold of you to assume a government entity is trusted. In the UK we have a large misrepresentative error due to our voting system.
willow@discuss.tchncs.de 7 months ago
And of course, even if they did, tech savvy kids can just self-host an instance on their own computer.
interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml 7 months ago
Comply or be defederated !