He has a vested interest in saying that, but he's right, and it would be awful
this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2026
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It's interesting what people expect of Proton Mail. I've used it for a long time but for only one reason really: their revenue stream is my subscription and not ads. I've never even given a second thought to all their encryption claims. Even with Proton Mail if I ever wanted to send a "secret" email I'd wrap the content in my own personal keys.
With respect to IP addresses of email logins, I'm surprised they ever claimed they don't have logs. You've always been able to review the IP of a login through the web UI as far as I remember. Was the idea that that was also supposed to be encrypted?
Personally I'm OK with them complying with court orders, but I understand that "the definition of criminal is state defined" and that poses serious issues. It kinda seems like if you want to do something that could be considered criminal at some point in your life by your country you should consider something other than a 3rd party email provider for those messages. Signal would be a step up in that regard if you still wanted to use a third party.
It's interesting what people expect of Proton Mail.
It's quite mundane actually: people expect what they advertise on their front page.
Their advertising is a stretch at the best of times, and (as seen on my first link) so terrible that it needs to be removed at other times.
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I mean, I've got boxes full of physical books and self hosted movies and Tv. At that point, I'll just stop using the internet. I need to go outside more anyway.
Finally all my friends that been giving me shit about having a dvd collection can eat shit.
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The next step will be to make more essential services online only, so people have to use the internet.
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Make social media unprofitable instead of this.
Basically don't allow ads for kids and only show social media posts from their friends in chronological order instead of any fancy algorithm. Also make them liable for showing scams to minors. That kills most profit.
Kill it from the other direction. Make it illegal to algorithmically adjust a users experience to prioritize interaction regardless of whether that's positive or negative. Ultimately that's the problem with places like Facebook, they weigh an angry rant the same as a positive one, higher even in a lot of cases. Things that make people angry generate a lot more interaction than positive things so it drowns people in hate and fear. If you treat any interaction as a positive signal things just devolve.
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Clearly this man is a genius.
Anyone who could not see that Trump was going to extort business for his own personal gain was clueless to Trump and his cabinet of blackmailers.
Anyone of color giving support to White Nationalists is fucking insane and shows a complete lack of understanding of current US politics.
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The nightmare trap of the Two Party System is that you can look at one party cozying up to Big Tech (Obama in 2009) and conclude the other party must be reflexively in opposition.
Trump was fully surrounded by Thiel goons before he'd even left office in '21. And the relationship only got tighter with his Elon Musk Bromance. But hey, if you'd just elected Kamala Harris and ~~Liz Cheney~~ Tim Walz to the White House, I'm sure nobody would be talking about how much of their cabinet was stuffed with Silicon Valley cutouts.
It's not like a cartel of trillionaires can buy up both parties at once, right?
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Anyone think that's not the point?
"Age Verification" is just them attaching "THINK OF THE CHILDREN" to their push to have every single bit of information about every person on the planet.
All the more ironic when you realise that some of the big businessmen and lobbyists pushing for mandatory age verification checks are in the Epstein Files. Basically the kind of pedos and pedo-apologists who you don't want to be thinking of the children...
Social media functions as a kind of gatekeeper for public interactions, not unlike credit scores, driver's licenses, and college degrees. The absence of a presence on social media is not only socially debilitating (you're cut out of the information stream for local events and public amenities) but a red-flag for college recruiters and employers. It's much like how not using a credit card regularly in your teens/20s impacts your ability to access low-interest lending in your 30s/40s. Or not having a driver's license interferes with your right to vote.
State officials have been searching for a kind of uniform, iron-clad, easily verifiable public ID for ages. Linking your online presence (a thing that you need for a myriad of daily tasks) to your ID becomes a pathway to this goal. Universal, non-transferable digital ID becomes a wicked two-edged sword as it both exhaustively tracks the "documented" individuals and neatly severs the "undocumented" from society.
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Man, parents not wanting anything to do with their kids' upbringing will believe anything, huh. They'd rather offload any and all responsibilities to automation than spend one minute teaching kids how to protect themselves.
Then again, they probably don't know, either.
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Can we make a new internet?
Yes, have a look at reticulum. No centralized addressing authority. No centralized domain naming system. Everything is globally routeable. It also just got support for transferring HTTP with RServer and MeshBrowser.
I always figured we would go to tor when this day came. But I keep seeing people mention all of these alternatives I have not heard of. Is this reticulum better?
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This whole conversation is such a false dichotomy. The laws can absolutely be written such that companies are required to suspend service to any suspected child without requiring ID to use the service.
But just like pollution and everything else we've let them push the buck to us.
The problem is that politicians don't want to legislate enforcement/oversight entities as those would piss off their owners.
Democracies need to replace their lame duck politicians with ones that aren't bought and owned by the shareholder class who also own the social media corporations.
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That's quite obviously the end goal here.
"Could" is a funny way of saying "are obviously intended to". Stop playing around, call it out directly. Points where you must have your ID checked are, in fact, ID checkpoints.
It bothers me that we know that this bullshit has nothing to do with the kids and is probably being lobbied by the genocide gang and AI companies, even more that it has become obvious that the only value AI has is mass monitoring, but nobody abords the real issue. We are playing their book.
99.9% navigate the system and grow up perfectly fine, or fine enough. We shouldn't have to completely surrender our anonymity for the time percentage that went wrong.
Before the Internet, some people go weird, and in the Internet era, some people are going to go weird. Age verification isn't going to change that.
We all know it. This isn't about the kids.
Stating the obvious.
META was a major lobbyist for all of the state bills we’ve seen so far. There’s probably more. Or META is taking the lead because most hate them already, which provides a nice distraction from anyone else involved.
Tech and data centers want our data. What better way for a complete data set is there? I’m sure Palantir is in there somewhere.
Kids don't have unfettered access if they are supervised, lol. And age gating will fail regardless. So it's a failure followed by another failure, sigh.
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If this becomes widespread, I just won't use any websites that require it. There will always be ways around it or alternatives for people opposed to losing their privacy. There already are at least 2 Internets. There's reddit and Facebook and Twitter and all the corporate news sites, and then there's Lemmy and archive.org and the dark web and dev pages and independent websites and piracy. I find I rarely care about the former anyway. It'll just mean being blocked off from all the corporate slop, which may be a blessing in disguise.
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“Turn into” ?
Moreso. It can always get worse, and indeed everything is.
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Maybe Kaczynski had a point by running off to the woods and living in a cabin.
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"It's for the KIDS, you COMMIE!"
It's time we stop accepting that rationalization as valid.
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