The greatest fear of a capitalist is not a brutal authoritarian regime. Their greatest fear is a population that will not give in to their every whim and risk slowing down that upward flow of wealth.
Given that, when democratic values are at-odds with the desires of capital, the values will be sacrificed. An authoritarian regime that retains the power structure is far better than a democratic one that threatens it.
The rich and powerful people are not fools. They can see the world is falling apart at the seams. That global warming is threatening the habitability of vast swaths of the globe, that food will become scarce, and then the masses will scheme to overthrow those in power whom do nothing but continue to squeeze everyone for every last drop of value.
And that is why VPNs are dangerous. The UK (and others) don't give two shits about making sure content is age-gated. The kiddy diddlers don't care about child porn. They fear losing control of their surveillance network. It is not a coincidence that mandatory ID uploading is coming in the same breath as mandatory encryption backdoors.
After 9/11, the refrain was always "don't let the terrorists win." Well they won. Our lives are ruled by fear and control.
I don’t think this is really the case. The reality is that in the UK, the OSA was popular. Voters wanted it. It survived two opposing ruling parties. When you poll people, it’s popular.
The argument of “if liquor stores check people’s ID, why shouldn’t porn sites” is very convincing for most people. Even if I personally think the law is misguided, I don’t think anyone is secretly orchestrating it. That honestly takes agency away from the actual root cause. It makes it seem like you can just stop the evil mustache twirlers and everything is great when the issue is really more deeply rooted than that.
I agree that it's a deeper problem than moustache twirling villains, but we do also live in a world with a hell of a lot of genuine moustache twirling villains in positions of significant power. I think the question is why this legislation, in particular, has made it through and is being doubled and tripled down on when plenty of ideas that would actually benefit the public don't get close. What balance of comic book villain, pearl clutching special interest group of six actual people with a very loud media megaphone, technologically misinformed voter, and authoritarian politician was it that made this happen in practice?
This isn't really a phenomenon? Messaging is important?
"Should ID's be checked at a liquor store"
"Sure!"
"Should the liquor store scan your ID, store a copy locally, and be required to provide the scan, date, and time to any and all authorities"
"No!"
Obviously this whole issue, like many before it with privacy and tech, has hinged on taking a fairly reasonable problem (holy shit kids can get to too many sites, but lets not highlight the gambling ones too much they're funding us....), and then coming up with an unreasonable solution.
And once again, like in the past, people are unwilling to do half decent messaging to counter that like the above example, and instead wind up sounding like lunatics who think "parents should just pay better attention" is a reasonable answer in an era of parents working double jobs, kids knowing more about tech, and very little in the way to help them.
If you ask people whether they support it, it looks popular. If you ask them whether they're willing to provide verification themselves, they say no. If you ask them whether it'll work, they say no. If you ask them whether it'll cause data breaches, they say yes
I don’t think that’s confusing or contradicting. People support the idea. People don’t think it’ll be perfect, in the same way that plenty of children manage to get their hands on alcohol. But they nonetheless see partial enforcement as better than not having it. They don’t consider themselves porn-consumers, or at least not on a survey.
I would also add that it’s seen as retributive against US tech companies. Again, that may not be the reality, but it’s seen as such. And retribution against US tech companies is viewed positively.
You’ve got half the respondents giving an answer even on the porn sites question, and a vast majority of that half saying they wouldn’t provide verification themselves. Unlikely to verify beats likely on every single category, from messages apps to pornography.
I think it’s a stretch to say that people actually support it in a meaningful way if they aren’t willing to obey the basic rules themselves. At best, they quite like the sound of the idea, or at least think they’re supposed to quite like the sound of the idea.
I also genuinely haven’t seen anything linking the OSA to weakening US tech. That might be my bubble, and I think I remember you mentioning that angle in another thread too, but for what it’s worth I’ve only ever seen that used around GDPR and similar privacy focused legislation.
I think that’s debating around the edges of the real issue, though. Like I said, the big question in my mind isn’t even “can you get a decent majority of people to think it’s broadly a good idea?”, it’s “why this, in particular, with such political forces and swiftness, when so many genuinely good ideas that are genuinely popular get nothing close?”
it’s “why this, in particular, with such political forces and swiftness, when so many genuinely good ideas that are genuinely popular get nothing close?”
Is it all that swift? The OSA was proposed in 2021. It wasn’t passed into law until 2023. It wasn’t enforced until 2026. All of the proposed laws in the EU are just that: proposals. It’ll be many years before they got voted on at all, let alone written into law. Seems like the normal slow cadence of laws.
Furthermore, you have to see who opposes the law. For the OSA, it was almost entirely big tech lobbyist. It’s currently a political environment where you can score easy wins on both sides of the aisle by owning big tech.
Finally, I think there’s a lot of reporting bias on legislation. There is rarely press about laws that pass, and a lot of press about laws that don’t.
For instance, in the US, did you know that Congress passed the No Surprises Act that bans hospitals from charging patients for out-of-network costs that the insurance company won’t cover? Broad, bipartisan support. 215-144 in the house, 100-0 in the senate.
Most people probably think we haven’t passed any laws in the US in the recent years, let alone a great consumer protection law, since the news is just about how the government is going to shut down again.
Well, yeah, because America is a pretty conservative and Christian country.
My point was more that both in America and in Europe where a lot of these laws are being proposed or passed, if something is broadly popular it does usually get passed in that time frame. The timeframe for the ID checks isn’t really anomalous when it’s something neither labor nor tories were against.
Compared to that, republicans were very much against gay marriage in the US, and even amongst democrats there were a lot of Christian moderates who were uneasy about it.
It's both though. People do want children protected online and at the same time there are mustache twirlers who take advantage of the fact that the general public doesn't understand technology.
The greatest fear of a capitalist is not a brutal authoritarian regime. Their greatest fear is a population that will not give in to their every whim and risk slowing down that upward flow of wealth.
Look I know it's not about the topic at hand or likely to convince you, but seriously I've heard the same poorly structured argument against socialism. Capitalists can be Authoritarians. Authoritarians can be Capitalists. There's not that much more of a link between the two ideologies than any other because almost by definition an Authoritarian will seek control through whatever means available.
If those means are market economies they will be there. If it's political appointments they'll be there. You do your cause no favors with these conflations especially between an economic system and a governmental one.
If those means are market economies they will be there.
Incidentally it is another great lie that market economies are the exclusive domain of a capitalist society. If anything, we've seen time and again that capitalists loathe markets. The desired state is never competition, which lowers profits.
I feel you misunderstood my point. I'll invert it. Capitalists are authoritarians who will tolerate democracy so long as it does not interfere with their profits. There are no democratic capitalists.
I understand your point. I think you're objectively wrong, much like how people who define socialism by the standards of only communist Russia are wrong.
Put 10 people in a room. Secretly give 1 person $910, everyone else gets $10. Tell them there is $1,000 split between everyone, and that they should vote to to figure out how to best distribute the money. Secretly give the person with the most money a button they can press after 5 minutes to stop the proceedings and everyone leaves with the money they have.
You gonna tell me that rich guy isn't gonna stall and then press the 'escape democracy' button at an extremely high rate?
I don't think that thought experiment maps to much at all, let alone capitalism, and seems to ignore the further point I was making about how most socialism is viewed through its failures rather than its supposed tenants.
Corruption and consolidation of power are systemic problems. No system is immune to them. Magical perfect communism tomorrow eventually winds up with 10 people in a room and 1 guy secretly getting what is, essentially, $910's worth of power/control/assets and pushing the same button.
There are interesting discussions about the role of capitalism as an economic system and its pairing with a political system (be that democratic, authoritarian, socialist, or otherwise), but this doesn't strike me as the topic for it.
Agree, and I won't dig in further (besides finishing out this last thought). I think my button serves as a pretty reasonable standin for beng able to undermine the democratic process. Though I suppose a far better experiment could be devised, I think even if you removed the extremes, you would see a pretty reliable pattern of the people with significantly above-average wealth will be far more likely than not to attempt to undermine a democratic outcome.
I posit that there is no speration between an economic system and a political system. Because money is power. But arguing that is a time for another day.
I do think it’s funny that VPN is the colloquial name for what in essence is a packet forwarding/masking service. The VPN protocol itself is just used as a secure tunnel from the client to the server. Like, does it make any sense that you use a virtual private network in order to have a server make requests on your behalf? VPNs are for making it so that your printer can talk to your computer. Tailscale is a VPN service. NordVPN really isn’t.
You can just as easily do packet forwarding with ssh or any number of protocols.
And it ends up mattering, because legislatures are always debating whether or not to ban the idea of virtual private networks instead of packet forwarders.
Having an exit node only for your network doesn’t make it the same sort of traffic escrow that these modern companies sell. That said, it would protect you from insecure networks, e.g. wifi. I guess I am saying the effectiveness depends on your threat model.
In the U.S., at least, you'd think the people pushing for VPN controls had never heard of HIPAA and HITECH regulations, which mandate encrypted connections for any transmission of ePHI over public networks. Or business credit card transactions, which have mandatory multiple layers of encryption. Or remote work. Or travel safety. Or any of the other "legitimate" uses for VPNs and packet forwarders.
VPNs are always discussed in terms of circumventing laws, never about enforcing legal privacy requirements or addressing real business or personal needs for unshared secrets that have nothing to do with porn, copyright infringement, drugs, underage social media access, or other claimed law enforcement interests.
I'm just parroting the party line here, but VPN restrictions are dumb ways to "protect children", aren't technically sound, and are authoritarian ways to restrict legitimate information access at the root.
This is some real bullshit. We thought a lot of these problems would be solved by getting younger folks that understand tech into these important government positions, but it turns out that only a tiny percentage of all generations actually understands what the fuck is going on and what’s truly at risk.
At this point? Fuck it, might as well abandon technology. I’m moving to the country; I’m gonna eat me a lot of peaches. (Just not from Del Monte.)
vord | 19 hours ago
The greatest fear of a capitalist is not a brutal authoritarian regime. Their greatest fear is a population that will not give in to their every whim and risk slowing down that upward flow of wealth.
Given that, when democratic values are at-odds with the desires of capital, the values will be sacrificed. An authoritarian regime that retains the power structure is far better than a democratic one that threatens it.
The rich and powerful people are not fools. They can see the world is falling apart at the seams. That global warming is threatening the habitability of vast swaths of the globe, that food will become scarce, and then the masses will scheme to overthrow those in power whom do nothing but continue to squeeze everyone for every last drop of value.
And that is why VPNs are dangerous. The UK (and others) don't give two shits about making sure content is age-gated. The kiddy diddlers don't care about child porn. They fear losing control of their surveillance network. It is not a coincidence that mandatory ID uploading is coming in the same breath as mandatory encryption backdoors.
After 9/11, the refrain was always "don't let the terrorists win." Well they won. Our lives are ruled by fear and control.
stu2b50 | 19 hours ago
I don’t think this is really the case. The reality is that in the UK, the OSA was popular. Voters wanted it. It survived two opposing ruling parties. When you poll people, it’s popular.
The argument of “if liquor stores check people’s ID, why shouldn’t porn sites” is very convincing for most people. Even if I personally think the law is misguided, I don’t think anyone is secretly orchestrating it. That honestly takes agency away from the actual root cause. It makes it seem like you can just stop the evil mustache twirlers and everything is great when the issue is really more deeply rooted than that.
Greg | 18 hours ago
If you ask people whether they support it, it looks popular. If you ask them whether they're willing to provide verification themselves, they say no. If you ask them whether it'll work, they say no. If you ask them whether it'll cause data breaches, they say yes. I genuinely don't see that level of confusion and contradiction matching up to the idea that it's so popular that a whole bunch of political parties globally just had to bring in these restrictions as a result of overwhelming public pressure.
I agree that it's a deeper problem than moustache twirling villains, but we do also live in a world with a hell of a lot of genuine moustache twirling villains in positions of significant power. I think the question is why this legislation, in particular, has made it through and is being doubled and tripled down on when plenty of ideas that would actually benefit the public don't get close. What balance of comic book villain, pearl clutching special interest group of six actual people with a very loud media megaphone, technologically misinformed voter, and authoritarian politician was it that made this happen in practice?
Eji1700 | 13 hours ago
This isn't really a phenomenon? Messaging is important?
"Should ID's be checked at a liquor store"
"Sure!"
"Should the liquor store scan your ID, store a copy locally, and be required to provide the scan, date, and time to any and all authorities"
"No!"
Obviously this whole issue, like many before it with privacy and tech, has hinged on taking a fairly reasonable problem (holy shit kids can get to too many sites, but lets not highlight the gambling ones too much they're funding us....), and then coming up with an unreasonable solution.
And once again, like in the past, people are unwilling to do half decent messaging to counter that like the above example, and instead wind up sounding like lunatics who think "parents should just pay better attention" is a reasonable answer in an era of parents working double jobs, kids knowing more about tech, and very little in the way to help them.
stu2b50 | 18 hours ago
I don’t think that’s confusing or contradicting. People support the idea. People don’t think it’ll be perfect, in the same way that plenty of children manage to get their hands on alcohol. But they nonetheless see partial enforcement as better than not having it. They don’t consider themselves porn-consumers, or at least not on a survey.
I would also add that it’s seen as retributive against US tech companies. Again, that may not be the reality, but it’s seen as such. And retribution against US tech companies is viewed positively.
Greg | 18 hours ago
You’ve got half the respondents giving an answer even on the porn sites question, and a vast majority of that half saying they wouldn’t provide verification themselves. Unlikely to verify beats likely on every single category, from messages apps to pornography.
I think it’s a stretch to say that people actually support it in a meaningful way if they aren’t willing to obey the basic rules themselves. At best, they quite like the sound of the idea, or at least think they’re supposed to quite like the sound of the idea.
I also genuinely haven’t seen anything linking the OSA to weakening US tech. That might be my bubble, and I think I remember you mentioning that angle in another thread too, but for what it’s worth I’ve only ever seen that used around GDPR and similar privacy focused legislation.
I think that’s debating around the edges of the real issue, though. Like I said, the big question in my mind isn’t even “can you get a decent majority of people to think it’s broadly a good idea?”, it’s “why this, in particular, with such political forces and swiftness, when so many genuinely good ideas that are genuinely popular get nothing close?”
stu2b50 | 18 hours ago
Is it all that swift? The OSA was proposed in 2021. It wasn’t passed into law until 2023. It wasn’t enforced until 2026. All of the proposed laws in the EU are just that: proposals. It’ll be many years before they got voted on at all, let alone written into law. Seems like the normal slow cadence of laws.
Furthermore, you have to see who opposes the law. For the OSA, it was almost entirely big tech lobbyist. It’s currently a political environment where you can score easy wins on both sides of the aisle by owning big tech.
Finally, I think there’s a lot of reporting bias on legislation. There is rarely press about laws that pass, and a lot of press about laws that don’t.
For instance, in the US, did you know that Congress passed the No Surprises Act that bans hospitals from charging patients for out-of-network costs that the insurance company won’t cover? Broad, bipartisan support. 215-144 in the house, 100-0 in the senate.
Most people probably think we haven’t passed any laws in the US in the recent years, let alone a great consumer protection law, since the news is just about how the government is going to shut down again.
vord | 12 hours ago
It took a hell of a lot longer than that for gay marriage to be legalized.
stu2b50 | 11 hours ago
Well, yeah, because America is a pretty conservative and Christian country.
My point was more that both in America and in Europe where a lot of these laws are being proposed or passed, if something is broadly popular it does usually get passed in that time frame. The timeframe for the ID checks isn’t really anomalous when it’s something neither labor nor tories were against.
Compared to that, republicans were very much against gay marriage in the US, and even amongst democrats there were a lot of Christian moderates who were uneasy about it.
hobbes64 | 18 hours ago
It's both though. People do want children protected online and at the same time there are mustache twirlers who take advantage of the fact that the general public doesn't understand technology.
Eji1700 | 13 hours ago
Look I know it's not about the topic at hand or likely to convince you, but seriously I've heard the same poorly structured argument against socialism. Capitalists can be Authoritarians. Authoritarians can be Capitalists. There's not that much more of a link between the two ideologies than any other because almost by definition an Authoritarian will seek control through whatever means available.
If those means are market economies they will be there. If it's political appointments they'll be there. You do your cause no favors with these conflations especially between an economic system and a governmental one.
vord | 12 hours ago
Incidentally it is another great lie that market economies are the exclusive domain of a capitalist society. If anything, we've seen time and again that capitalists loathe markets. The desired state is never competition, which lowers profits.
I feel you misunderstood my point. I'll invert it. Capitalists are authoritarians who will tolerate democracy so long as it does not interfere with their profits. There are no democratic capitalists.
Eji1700 | 12 hours ago
I understand your point. I think you're objectively wrong, much like how people who define socialism by the standards of only communist Russia are wrong.
vord | 10 hours ago
Fair. My thought experiment.
Put 10 people in a room. Secretly give 1 person $910, everyone else gets $10. Tell them there is $1,000 split between everyone, and that they should vote to to figure out how to best distribute the money. Secretly give the person with the most money a button they can press after 5 minutes to stop the proceedings and everyone leaves with the money they have.
You gonna tell me that rich guy isn't gonna stall and then press the 'escape democracy' button at an extremely high rate?
Eji1700 | 10 hours ago
I agree they'll push the button.
I don't think that thought experiment maps to much at all, let alone capitalism, and seems to ignore the further point I was making about how most socialism is viewed through its failures rather than its supposed tenants.
Corruption and consolidation of power are systemic problems. No system is immune to them. Magical perfect communism tomorrow eventually winds up with 10 people in a room and 1 guy secretly getting what is, essentially, $910's worth of power/control/assets and pushing the same button.
There are interesting discussions about the role of capitalism as an economic system and its pairing with a political system (be that democratic, authoritarian, socialist, or otherwise), but this doesn't strike me as the topic for it.
vord | 10 hours ago
Agree, and I won't dig in further (besides finishing out this last thought). I think my button serves as a pretty reasonable standin for beng able to undermine the democratic process. Though I suppose a far better experiment could be devised, I think even if you removed the extremes, you would see a pretty reliable pattern of the people with significantly above-average wealth will be far more likely than not to attempt to undermine a democratic outcome.
I posit that there is no speration between an economic system and a political system. Because money is power. But arguing that is a time for another day.
stu2b50 | 19 hours ago
I do think it’s funny that VPN is the colloquial name for what in essence is a packet forwarding/masking service. The VPN protocol itself is just used as a secure tunnel from the client to the server. Like, does it make any sense that you use a virtual private network in order to have a server make requests on your behalf? VPNs are for making it so that your printer can talk to your computer. Tailscale is a VPN service. NordVPN really isn’t.
You can just as easily do packet forwarding with ssh or any number of protocols.
And it ends up mattering, because legislatures are always debating whether or not to ban the idea of virtual private networks instead of packet forwarders.
donn | 19 hours ago
Whenever I have to explain I use Tailscale to SSH home I have to be like "so it's a VPN in the classical sense" lmao
Then again you can also use it to use your home computer as an exit node. which acts like the other "VPNs"
Wulfsta | 13 hours ago
Having an exit node only for your network doesn’t make it the same sort of traffic escrow that these modern companies sell. That said, it would protect you from insecure networks, e.g. wifi. I guess I am saying the effectiveness depends on your threat model.
patience_limited | 17 hours ago
In the U.S., at least, you'd think the people pushing for VPN controls had never heard of HIPAA and HITECH regulations, which mandate encrypted connections for any transmission of ePHI over public networks. Or business credit card transactions, which have mandatory multiple layers of encryption. Or remote work. Or travel safety. Or any of the other "legitimate" uses for VPNs and packet forwarders.
VPNs are always discussed in terms of circumventing laws, never about enforcing legal privacy requirements or addressing real business or personal needs for unshared secrets that have nothing to do with porn, copyright infringement, drugs, underage social media access, or other claimed law enforcement interests.
I'm just parroting the party line here, but VPN restrictions are dumb ways to "protect children", aren't technically sound, and are authoritarian ways to restrict legitimate information access at the root.
Narry | 2 hours ago
This is some real bullshit. We thought a lot of these problems would be solved by getting younger folks that understand tech into these important government positions, but it turns out that only a tiny percentage of all generations actually understands what the fuck is going on and what’s truly at risk.
At this point? Fuck it, might as well abandon technology. I’m moving to the country; I’m gonna eat me a lot of peaches. (Just not from Del Monte.)