Online Safety Bill – Some futures

Curate your content manually, and select by hand what your kids will watch, or don't let them online at all. Since most parents are not willing, or most likely not even capable of doing this, legislation needs to be put in place to restrict what content can be shown to children.

Tablets I’m much less concerned about as I usually cache apps/shows and manage access via physical means (ie: we take them away and only doll them out for trips or as a reward)

At home my parents were always very careful what content I was exposed to. With very few exceptions I wasn't allowed to watch / play films and video games that were 12+ until I was in secondary school.

But outside my home (especially coming from a crappy neighbourhood) I was exposed to a lot of explicit content from other children (and their parents).

Obviously the internet exacerbates this problem, but short of outlawing the entire internet there's very little that can actually be done about that. Even with all of the proposed restrictions kids will still be able to access explicit content if their parents allow them to do so.

So if what we really want is to empower parents then there are better ways to do this at home via ISPs and routers with configurable content filters.

And if we want proof for this then we should remember that this isn't an issue that exists at school because they have the internet locked down. The idea that the only way to we empower parents is by handing control to the government and corporations makes no sense. The issue is that parents either don't care to or don't know how to restrict content. If it's the former, this isn't a problem (assuming you believe rights of the parent trump that of the state), if it's latter, then let's just create regulation for ISPs to ensure they're providing sufficiently easy and capable content filters.

Requiring all content providers operating in the UK break encryption and implement their own content filters is beyond absurd. It really only makes sense if you assume the state is doing this intentionally as a power grab.

Like MSTRKRFT

I'd like to think that my ability to communicate via the written word would imply a healthy functioning ability to think critically, which I further hope would imply that I'm able to think past base, lizard brain reactions that are so irrationally toxic in a global society context.

My argument would be that it _could_ be seen that way, and you're gambling either that it won't be or that you'd be able to convince the authorities that your usage was entirely legitimate. If your VPN connection terminates at a major corporate office in the same country, that's going to be a lot easier than if you're connecting to a public VPN service which doesn't follow local laws. It's nowhere near certain that they'd go after you but basically I'd be hesitant to recommend to anyone that they leave a public track record of using something which could be viewed as a circumvention tool because you don't always know in advance when changes in leadership mean that some previously unused law will be zealously enforced or creatively reinterpreted – we're seeing that in the United States where things like a doctor's office having a Facebook button is now a problem in that it allows a conservative prosecutor to subpoena Facebook's records for anyone in their jurisdiction looking for birth control.

> And what does it mean for a VPN client to geolocate to the country level?

Say I'm running a VPN service. Even if I'm in a different country, the UK government can come to me and say that my service will be blocked unless I buy IPs on a UK network and ensure that any client request originating from a UK network has their traffic routed through those IPs, and they'll audit that my company follows all applicable legal requirements for logging, identity validation, etc. Anyone running a legitimate business is faced with the choice of to either cooperating or not serving UK clients, and most are going to set up those dedicated ranges if they haven't already for other reasons such as geofenced content, and having a business presence means it's easy for further requirements to be attached in the future.

Everyone else is basically playing a dangerous game of getting blocked and/or attracting more attention as the percentage of VPN traffic by law-abiding users goes down. Each level of difficulty is going to mean that more people drop out – privacy benefits constantly being weighed against performance/stability – so it'll be easier for VPNs to be portrayed as law-evasion technology, especially if people try to bypass ISP-level blocks by tunneling their traffic since a judge is going to be told that you would only do that if you knew you were violating laws.

This is why I was trying to push the solutions as political: yes, not everything turns into China overnight but there's a long-running attitude in technical circles that this kind of thing can be solved with technical measures and that's only true in societies which value privacy and the rule of law. This century has more examples contradicting “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it” than supporting it.

But this is probably just because everyone can be an expert (or even just "knowledgeable enough") in maybe one or two things, and have to rely on not-necessarily-trustworthy sources on all other topics.

This averages out to "the wind blows in the direction that the majority of the media says it blows".

And I don't know if that is a solvable problem. Not without a radically different style of government.

I really feel how apt, but also defeatist, this quote is:

"Indeed it has been said that democ­ra­cy is the worst form of Gov­ern­ment except for all those oth­er forms that have been tried from time to time.…"

Strange they don’t see how bad this is… and what an excuse terrorism and ‘the children’ are for blanket surveillance.