Every single fucking time someone says this is technically impossible and also unconstitutional, nerds rush to debug the problems with the accuracy of the orphan crushing machine as a nifty technical problem without questioning the ethics or purpose of the machine itself. bsky.app/profile/raha...
"Oooh, an interesting technical problem! What if we issued cryptographically verifiable tokens to figure out if the person approaching the machine has living parents?"
Rah, I just respect the hell out of your cranky pants takes on these problems. I'm an aging nerd and you and Masnick have kind of woken me up to how these systems really mesh with the real world. Definitely some of the most important voices to listen to here because of that knowledge.
Really, it's related to Anil's post (and my commentary) on systems from the other day: bsky.app/profile/raha... You have to assume the obviously foreseeable consequences of the proposed system are the intended output of the system and act accordingly.
This is an incredibly good explanation of a principle that a lot of people really struggle with. The purpose of a system is what the system does. Highlighting the bad outputs of a system does not suffice to make the creators change the system, because they designed the bad outputs into the system.
People assume the deanonymization and censorship are a side effect of "protecting children" rather than "protecting children" being the vehicle by which the deanonymization and censorship will be made acceptable in the court of public opinion.
So when people point out the law can't be implemented without deanonymization, their minds immediately go to "how can I do this with sufficient protection against deanonymization", because they're assuming the deanonymization is a side effect of the goal of "protecting children".
But it's not. State and federal governments want to be able to control what speech people are exposed to, and are taking the opportunity to also throw in "the ability to subpoena the identity of any person using the internet" as lagniappe. That's the reason to fight these bills as hard as you can.
Conceding even a single inch of "the government can control what ideas people are exposed to", no matter what those ideas are or how terrible you think the specific ideas are, is a terrible idea because the government's definition of "ideas people shouldn't be exposed to" can change at any second.
I've long held that whenever you want to pass a law or make a rule or whatever you should think "what could people with beliefs I'm fundamentally opposed to use this rule to do?" Especially with laws since it's the very nature of government for power to switch hands regularly.
Watching all of the insanity of DeSantis' Florida is very recent reminder of what the stakes are. Even on the right/far right side, I can't imagine they would want to cede this kind of authority to libs either. We need to stop fantisizing that we can solve identity with any mathematical sophistry.
Yeah, and with a potentially devastating authoritarian regime seemingly lurking and waiting to pounce at all times, you just have to fight incredibly hard the second these terrible ideas start trying to be legislation. Protecting anonymity and rights is better in the long run anyways.
I really wish states would put this effort into educating parents on how to use parental control software instead. The existing systems are confusing! But they exist!
I don't *love* them, because I think kids are autonomous individuals with rights of their own, but I acknowledge that many-if-not-all parents are doing their best.
Sure, but it's a process, obviously you can't just throw you kid into the deep end, you have to be able to help them deconstruct and understand ideas slowly or holy shit can you do emotional damage.
Fundamentally its up to parents to look out for their own kids and to do the homework. The demands at the atomic level of the family do not translate upstream, it's complicated in a way that all the nerds in the world will never solve for everyone everwhere. Just be glad we can fix things in scope.
I can do *way* more with Microsoft Family Safety than I expected, but my mom couldn't do half as much. (When it asks you if "a new app" is acceptable, it uses the name the application uses for itself. Did you know War Thunder is "easy anti-cheat launcher" (all lowercase)?)
Cracks me up that I'm relatively tech savy, but it seems like my best options are tossing the kids in the walled garden and leaving the wilds of the open web to myself. Good solutions don't really exist for household net consumption, but I'll always want this hyper local, not state controlled.
Right! Like, I acknowledge that there is a legitimate reason for parents to be concerned about some stuff and I'd like for them to have a better understanding of how to deploy the tools that are already available!
