This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
As a parent myself I do sort of wonder why parents are incapable of dealing with their own children. They're really stupid it isn't that hard.
But also my parents barely understood what the internet was, I turned out absolutely fine, I don't feel the need to do anything particularly objectionable. Why can't everyone just calm down?
It's backee by large companies like meta who pay millions
Because it's not about that.
There is a local initiative going around for age verification software and I am baffled that anybody support that, and moreso that parents created a software and the initiative.
While I agree with your point hat parents need to shoulder a lot more of the responsibility, there is a huge difference between the internet of today and the internet of even 10 years ago.
I grew up online and turned out fine, but I also didn’t have my entire digital identity tied into several social media sites whose only purpose is to make money out of my existence with predatory practices. I didn’t grow up in a world where all communication happened through these sites, and not being on them restricted my access to real world people and businesses. I didn’t grow up in a world where YouTube specifically and deliberately fed me dangerous content in a steady stream because foreign weirdos gamed the algorithm. Sure, I saw the odd beheading video but those links usually came from a real human being.
You're both right, and you're both missing the point since you're engaging with their "save the childrun!" smokescreen.
This is about ending anonymity and privacy on the net, plain and simple.
No I understand that's the objective but you have to engage with them on the platform they've chosen. If they want to argue that we need to save the children then they need to demonstrate an arguement along those lines.
Force the companies to behave, not the populace to be controlled.
After all why wont someone think of the lazy parents.
Accountability from parents being the elephant standing next to the mass surveillance elephant in the room.
I hate when people do this. "The EU does X".
No, it does not. There's no law, no resolution, no recommendation towards doing this from the EU.
The European Parliamentary Research Service is a think-tank that's supposed to inform the MEPs. So, the actual title should be: "a think-tank in Europe calls VPNs 'a loophole that needs closing'".
The fact that anyone with any power (and they do have the power to influence politicians, which is more than what your average citizen has) is even suggesting this should absolutely be alarming. It is "only a suggestion" now, and then next time when the politicians vote on it it might be late.
This is an extremely ignorant take.
A think-tank is supposed to inform, but an informed decision can only be made if the person making the decision is fully informed.
First of all - we don't know if the think-tank said ONLY that. Maybe it was one ten different things they reported.
Second of all - what was the context of the report? Was it "what do we need to do to ensure that age verification is fool proof?" Or was it "IF we introduce age verification, what are some of the pitfalls we can encounter?"
Stop panicking. The EU operates on democratic principles, and everybody knows well in advance about any votes happening.
EDIT: just read the abstract of the report - yeah, it's a nothingburger. "VPN can be used to bypass age verification" is what it says. Which is a statement of fact. Sure, the language of their tweet is shifty (with a strong push to introducing AV), but who cares? The idea was shot down a couple of times already, and it will be shot down again unless a solution is found that guarantees privacy of users.
My point is that institutions like that simply should not exist. They are effectively lobbying groups (if it's nonprofit / non-governmental organization) or propaganda machines (if established by the people in power).
Neither has any place in democracy.
We don't need "purpose built" think tanks; we need people with actual experience, with jobs, etc. giving in their 10 cents of expertise when required.
And they should be required only when the governmening bodies are implementing things they have been actually voted in to do. We shouldn't havr good-for-nothing "government employees" fearing to be out of job creating busywork for themselves that only perpetuates and creates layers upon layers of useless bureaucracy that nakes the average person's lives worse.
Look up the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025 in the USA. They are "just a think tank."
Yet*
The EU is not the US.
It'd be nice if there was a way to de-clickbait article titles automatically.
Someone from my country created a browser extension that translated clickbait article titles to descriptive titles using LLM. He got sued for copyright infringement by the most clickbaity "news" outlet in Denmark, forcing him to shut down the extension.
I wonder how a lawsuit like that would have any merit.
It likely wouldn't have any but when a large company sues you as an individual it is more about the cost of engagement and the risks it involves.
Even better if the think tanks had to state their funding sources by human name in the title.
Children don't use VPNs! You know what does? Your job. Applications. MPLS and SD-WAN connections that every company uses to secure their data over the Internet.
This is about control and monetization. We cannot allow this lunacy to take hold in any part of the world.
I keep telling this story on every opportunity. I found out that IT blocked some game on my kids school network, and their peers were sharing this wisdom to get around it: "go on the app store, search free VPN and install the first one that comes up.
That is how this backfires. It just sets kids up as targets of the worst scum. And turns their devices into good little botnet nodes.
My kids devices went on my own tailnet that night so they could play the game.
I mean , web is gonna become more and more separate and nation clustered. It's inevitable.
I don't think I'd say "inevitable". Possible, maybe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splinternet
The splinternet (also referred to as cyber-balkanization or internet balkanization) is a characterization of the Internet as splintering and dividing due to various factors, such as technology, commerce, politics, nationalism, religion, and divergent national interests. "Powerful forces are threatening to balkanise it", wrote the Economist weekly in 2010, arguing it could soon splinter along geographic and commercial boundaries.[1] The Chinese government erected the "Great Firewall" for political reasons, and Russia has enacted the Sovereign Internet Law that allows it to partition itself from the rest of the Internet.[2][3] Other nations, such as the US and Australia, have discussed plans to create a similar firewall to block child pornography or weapon-making instructions.[1]
Clyde Wayne Crews, a researcher at the Cato Institute, first used the term in 2001 to describe his concept of "parallel Internets that would be run as distinct, private, and autonomous universes."[4] The concept itself dates back at least to pair of articles in the journal Science and at the International Conference on Information Systems by Marshall van Alstyne and Erik Brynjolfsson in 1996 and 1997.[5][6] They argued that it the Internet and related technologies "have the potential to fragment interaction and divide groups by leading people to spend more time on special interests and by screening out less preferred contact." They dubbed this effect "cyberbalkanization" and developed a set of formal measures.[7]
Crews used the term in a positive sense, but more recent writers, like Scott Malcomson, a fellow in New America's International Security program, use the term pejoratively to describe a growing threat to the internet's status as a globe-spanning network of networks.[8]
Why does it feel like the EU caught herpes from the USA lately? Get your shit together EU.
Same ruler
excuse me i clearly have electrogonnorhea, the noisy killer
These politicians are either gigantic morons or malicious pieces of shit. Probably both.
This unfortunately
The EU can kiss my loophole
Kids smart enough to use VPN's shouldn't need age verificaiton.
VPNs have always been a loophole... how about listening to what your citizens want, rather than shareholders, mostly of American companies?
If only we'd had age verification back then, Epstein and his ring of sex traffickers would never have been able to abuse those children!
/s
what's funny is that this age verification shit is only going to make it easier to track children online and target them.
The problem is that the internet is fucking global. As long as that is the case, it is simply not possible to fix this problem.
You can put whatever regulations you want on online content, and some provider from a different jurisdiction is going to say screw you I abide by the laws of my own jurisdiction. The restricted citizens will use that company.
It is like making drugs illegal when there is still an illegal drug dispenser in every home. It doesn't work.
The most you can do is try to block this at the payment level, but that requires setting up a very intrusive payment blacklist or whitelist system. And then some VPN provider will just make themselves ad supported and you are back at square one.
And that doesn't even touch the issue of torrents, p2p file sharing, and decentralized networks. Go back to the early to mid-200s and everybody used those things because most of the content they wanted wasn't easily available legally. Then it became easily available and people started paying for it. But you throw enough roadblocks, make people subscribe to too many streaming services, require too much age verification type crap, and the world will sail the high seas once again.
If you've ever been on the internet in China, Russia, or Iran you can get a taste for how powerful this kind of regulation can be. Correct, there are loopholes but it can be made quite difficult to access the things you take for granted when you experience this kind of lock down.
That's true, but the kind of lockdown on the Internet that China does can't be done with just regulation and mandates.
There is an absolutely mind-moggling server infrastructure managing the routing and filtering at every Internet point of entry/exit in China, and it is directly physically filtering traffic headed for consumption by people in China.
Its nickname, "The Great Firewall of China", while hilarious, is an apt analogy for it. They literally built a barrier around their country's Internet borders to keep out unapproved information, and probably Mongols.
Meanwhile, kids are drawing on mustaches to bypass it. Fucking idiots.
I really hope Iceland rejects this madness and votes against joining the EU. They should protect their sovereignty and continue to be a haven of internet freedom.
EU tries to encourage technology advances in EU and promote digital sovereignity. EU wants to impose restrictions on any advances without really understanding why, or what they are talking about.
Ug this whole thing is so stupid and predictable. Who could have seen this coming?
The HBO series Silicon Valley was right. We need a new Internet.
The internet isn't the problem. The capital is.
