• 8 Posts
  • 865 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: April 27th, 2024

help-circle


  • It’s mostly just that I don’t want the government to know precisely which websites I visit. Nor do I want the the porn sites to know exactly who I am.

    I understand, I want that too. It’s easily possible though (just one example for a scheme):

    • you visit porn site
    • porn site sends your browser a random nonce
    • you/browser tell government service: sign this if I’m >18
    • government signs the nonce + a timstamp to prove freshness
    • your browser forwards the result to the porn site
    • porn site can verify signature per standard public certificate chains
    • now porn site has proof that you are >18, but knows nothing else about you; and government only knows that you wanted proof that you are an adult, but not for what site or purpose you wanted to prove that

    Alternatively, if we go the “device has an age bracket field browsers access” route, it’s even simpler, and just as if not more privacy preserving.




  • So let me get this straight:

    When I was 13, I managed to figure out the router password, disabled child protection for myself, then watched porn on my Android 2.3 phone that I had managed to put a custom ROM on because I liked the way it looked and had no idea what a “launcher” was yet.

    This is not a hypothetical btw.

    My parents were smart enough to enable appropriate blocking and secured access to those settings. I’m not sure something on-device was available at the time, but I included the bit about the custom rom to demonstrate that, even though I didn’t know WTF I was doing, I was more than capable of fucking around with the tech to get it to do what I wanted.

    So were my parents in breach of their duties on child protection?

    I don’t think they were. They actually did educate themselves (visiting a course / parent meetup to discuss and learn how to protect me from the Internet), and implemented everything they learned.

    I was just a little shit and found a way around this.

    And this is NOT an edgecase. Because guess what. It takes one kid in the friend group to figure out a way to circumvent parental controls, and then EVERYONE knows how to do it.

    It simply does not fucking matter how well intentioned, knowledgeable, and present the parents are (mine were all of that).

    Going “this would not be a problem if parents parented” is the LAZIEST fucking excuse, and I’m sick and tired of reading about it on here.

    (Because I probably have to make it clear: I’m not advocating for photo/passport scanning, third party age verification,… and all that bullshit. What I think would be a FANTASTIC idea would be privacy-preserving age verification. There are two good ways to do this: 1) on a login attempt, prove that you are of age by presenting a fresh, signed token from a government service proving that you are over 18, and nothing else; site does not get any info, government does not know what you were trying to access; 2) a device-level age field. Proof here comes from the device itself, and can be 100% privacy preserving; just a “yep, is of age”. In this scenario… GUESS WHAT, PARENTS GET ENABLED TO PARENT “PROPERLY” BY PROVIDING THEM WITH A GOOD, SIMPLE, PRIVACY-PRESERVING TECHNICAL SOLUTION.)





    1. increasing work hours is a one-time “boost”. It gives a numbers bump once. It’s not continued growth.
    2. working LESS has been shown time and time again to actually make workers more productive
    3. working more will mean even fewer children, a problem we desperately need to address and which will harm the economy even more in the long term
    4. our social contract is broken. Fixing the economy and the country can’t be done by extracting more work from the working class. The decades-long profiteers from privatization and giga-profits need their stolen wealth ripped from them. I can not understate this point. Literally all our economical and most of our societal problems could be fixed relatively easily by spending money: repair infrastructure; properly fund and repair the Bahn; pay teachers enough to make the job attractive, fix up schools, make proper education available to everyone; pay higher wages, so parents can choose to only have one parent working, but also provide free Kitas; and so on. I even would go as far as to say that materially and directly improving people’s lives like this would deal a blow to the rise of right wing politics and faschism, since a lot of those voters are simply frustrated with their misery and powerlessness (not all, obv…). A supposedly center-left party going “höh–höh, suck it, work more” does the opposite of this. And to get back to this bullet point: the money for ALL of that and more IS THERE. Just… Unjustly held by the few.

    Now tell me again, why is it on me to spend additional years of my life toiling away to “fix” the economy when it’s ineffectual, counterproductive down the line, and a much easier, more just solution exists?


    1. increasing work hours is a one-time “boost”. It gives a numbers bump once. It’s not continued growth.
    2. working LESS has been shown time and time again to actually make workers more productive
    3. working more will mean even fewer children, a problem we desperately need to address and which will harm the economy even more in the long term
    4. our social contract is broken. Fixing the economy and the country can’t be done by extracting more work from the working class. The decades-long profiteers from privatization and giga-profits need their stolen wealth ripped from them. I can not understate this point. Literally all our economical and most of our societal problems could be fixed relatively easily by spending money: repair infrastructure; properly fund and repair the Bahn; pay teachers enough to make the job attractive, fix up schools, make proper education available to everyone; pay higher wages, so parents can choose to only have one parent working, but also provide free Kitas; and so on. I even would go as far as to say that materially and directly improving people’s lives like this would deal a blow to the rise of right wing politics and faschism, since a lot of those voters are simply frustrated with their misery and powerlessness (not all, obv…). A supposedly center-left party going “höh–höh, suck it, work more” does the opposite of this. And to get back to this bullet point: the money for ALL of that and more IS THERE. Just… Unjustly held by the few.

    Now tell me again, why is it on me to spend additional years of my life toiling away to “fix” the economy when it’s ineffectual, counterproductive down the line, and a much easier, more just solution exists?