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Comment by qnpnpmqppnp | Hacker News Reader

This title seems misleading.

The EP paper appears to be highlighting the existence of a debate regarding VPN.

Relevant quote:

"Some argue that this is a loophole in the legislation that needs closing and call for age verification to be required for VPNs as well. In response, some VPN providers argue that they do not share information with third parties and state that their services are not intended for use by children in the first place. The Children's Commissioner for England has called for VPNs to be restricted to adult use only.

While privacy advocates argue that imposing age-verification requirements on VPNs would pose significant risk to anonymity and date protection, child-safety campaigners claim that their widespread use by minors requires a regulatory response. Pornhub and other large pornography platforms have reportedly lost web traffic following the enforcement of age-verification rules in the UK, while VPN apps have reached the top of download rankings."

Of course I'm not saying the EU won't regulate VPNs, but nowhere in this paper is "the EU" stating that VPNs need closing.

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These dimwits (and I don't just mean those in EU) seriously want to stop adolescents from watching porn, and are ready to mess with internet infrastructure for that. That's a depressing manifestation of aging society

Practically all the ills we suffer currently are depressing manifestations of an aging society.

That, and the lack of real issues to solve.

If only we were all privileged enough to believe that the problems in the world today weren't real.

I was talking about the first world. And yes, I think most if not all of the problems in the first world are gratuitously self-inflicted.

Where is the cushy insulated bubble you're living? Can I join?

Even if that were true (it isn't) you would want to consider the systemic issues that background self-sabotage.

There are real problems and they are huge but the solutions to them are very unpopular. So that's why political parties resort to this kind of distraction politics. Blaming immigrants, LGBT people etc. Or simply causing other problems by bombing random countries for no reason.

Because nobody wants to limit the big corporations polluting the world and exploiting the population, tackle climate change with more than some hollow measures. Because people will be annoyed when it affects them and that means political suicide.

So they manufacture other problems, ones they can control and point the blame to groups that have little voting power.

Without thinking too hard I can name a few?

The rise of authoritarianism? Inequality? Revival of geopolitical "realism"? Decrease in empathy and holistic thinking? Increasing willingness of the general population to engage in political adventurism? Accelerating resource consumption (and decelerating resource stocks).

And if you consider none of those "real" problems, I know some people seem to have forgotten about it, but what about climate change? Given the half-life of CO2 and methane, that's a problem as "real" as they get.

There's also a worrying trend of education getting less effective across the first world.

> seriously want to stop adolescents from watching porn

no, they want to pretend this is the issue, so that pervasive monitoring or permission and/or deanonymization is normalized. It is to serve the state apparatus, rather than any actual protection.

If it is possible to "pretend that they want something reasonable", it means that there is something reasonable somewhere.

Maybe some want more control, but most certainly not everybody.

> so that pervasive monitoring

If you haven't gotten the memo, pervasive monitoring already exists. To sell ads.

> or permission and/or deanonymization is normalized

For age verification, it's possible to do it in a privacy-preserving manner. Now people spend their time complaining about the idea and claiming that all who disagree are extremists, so it doesn't help. But we could instead try to push for privacy-preserving age verification.

guy on website called hackernews, tries to convince everyone more restrictions are good

Website called "Hacker News" has had zilch to do with the Hacking community for almost a decade now. It's VC and corporate apologist news.

Are you calling me a corporate apologist? For one, corporations want less regulation.

"Being a hacker" does not mean "being stuck in the 80s", IMO. If TooBigTech cryptographically controls everything, it becomes harder to hack. Are you aware that the biggest restriction against jailbreaking stuff is that it was made super illegal... because it helps corporations?

> Are you calling me a corporate apologist? For one, corporations want less regulation

Ah yes, so that's why Meta et al are the main ones behind pushes for more "think of the children" ID verification/attestation regulations.

Is that how it went? My feeling is that more and more people are realising that social media are terrible for the children (well, for everybody, but children we want to protect). Therefore more governments are looking into preventing children from accessing social media. Therefore social media companies are trying to lobby for whatever is better for them.

For Meta, it's better to have age verification than to downright ban social media.

In my experience they DO want more regulation. Regulation that helps them. The automobile’s industry was lobbying for years to have all kinds of things mandatory. They invented lots of standards and pseudo standards. At the end they shoot themselves in the foot.

You open with corporations want less regulations then give an example of corporations using law to protect their interests around jailbreaking? Just like they did with copyright/IP rules and the million rules around cars

You should ask the DIY diabetes community what they think of FDA regulations preventing modifications of medical devices.

Being reductive about this stuff is not a helpful framing.

As a hacker, I want antitrust to break TooBigTech such that they can't cryptographically lock me out of everything.

Those who want less regulation are not hackers, but rich and powerful assholes.

Hey, I'm not rich and powerful, how dare you.

Regulations are also restrictions, lots of people here are pro regulation when it comes to things they don't like.

This topic is just unfavorable with this community... for good reasons.

what i personally don't like about privacy-preserving age verification is the single subsequent law change that would criminalize individuals for "improperly" doing age verification.

it'd be so easy to do, and would immediately make obsolete any measures taken digitally to preserve privacy

How would an individual improperly do age verification?

It's not really about kids looking at porn, it's about tracking everyone else and making it easier for state surveillance and corporations to identify people.

Kids don't have money and hardly ever manage to do crime without getting caught so they're profoundly uninteresting to surveil in this way, but adults are and here the interests of the state and corporations converge so they'll make a push for tyranny.

But how to make people accept it? Tell them they want to expose kids to gruesome tentacle porn, or else they'd support this. Few adults are willing to admit they even look at porn, let alone argue that this is an important activity that needs to be protected, which it is.

If you think that there is a need for new technology to identify people, I suggest you wake up and start getting informed about surveillance capitalism.

There is absolutely no need for new technology to track people, it's there already.

Also I feel like a big reason for age verification is social media. Many countries are trying to prevent kids from accessing social media (because we know it's bad for them), and age verification is the way to do that.

Badly implemented, age verification is bad. But there are ways to implement it in a privacy-preserving manner, which wouldn't make the current state of surveillance capitalism worse.

Need is a very strong word. I'd call it a desire. Currently you can often identify people, sure, but there's hassle involved. What they want to do is to plug in a private corporation separate from whatever service that is likely to be more loyal with the state apparatus than the service, or else it is easily switched out for another.

And corporations are having issues discerning bots from people without making access to their services a fuss or dependent on possibly idealistic and troublesome open source projects, like Anubis.

It's truly, absolutely, not about "age verification". If it were about protecting kids from harm they'd take money from corporations post factum that are offending. Instead they're preparing to spend a lot of money. You could also look at who is heavily lobbying for this, you'll find it is fascist tech oligarchs from the US. They couldn't care less about kids except for obscene or profitable purposes. It would be weird for them to be cosy with epsteinian networks of power and at the same time be mindful about the wellbeing of children.

> Currently you can often identify people, sure, but there's hassle involved

You vastly underestimate the current state of surveillance capitalism.

> You could also look at who is heavily lobbying for this, you'll find it is fascist tech oligarchs from the US.

Go in the street, and ask a bunch of random people: "If there was a way to prevent kids from accessing stuff that is bad for them, and it had no downsides. Would you want it?". I'm absolutely certain that not only fascists will say they would want it.

Well why did you say to them it doesnt have downsides? It has downsides and a very essential one like privacy.

> Well why did you say to them it doesnt have downsides? It has downsides and a very essential one like privacy.

It is possible to do age verification in a privacy-preserving manner. So... you're wrong here.

No one is doing it that way though. Also to be truly privacy-preserving you cannot rely on anything that requires any specific OS (especially Android or iOS) as every single OS requires some compromises to privacy.

The only privacy-preserving (effective) age verification is asking user if they are over 18 and requiring that they answer truthfully under penalty of perjury. Then prosecute the kids who claim they are over 18. For reason or another no one seems to be pushing for that option.

> No one is doing it that way though

Well it exists in Privacy Pass, which is deployed in production. And there are countries that are currently actively looking into privacy-preserving age verification. I don't think that "I keep saying that age verification fundamentally leaks your ID, which is wrong, but it's still valid because nobody will notice" is a good argument.

> The only privacy-preserving (effective) age verification is asking user if they are over 18 and requiring that they answer truthfully under penalty of perjury.

I disagree, I think that there could be a sane debate around ZK age verification, if we could elevate it to that.

OK, so make an argument.

My argument is: it is possible to do privacy-preserving age verification, and that technology is already deployed (look at Privacy Pass). We should acknowledge that and stop claiming that the age verification issue is the same as the E2EE one, because it is NOT.

And then we could maybe have a constructive debate about whether or not we as a society want that technology. That would be more interesting than "if I keep yelling that it's fundamentally stupid, maybe people on the other side will start believing it".

You're still just stating your opinions. What do you mean by "it is possible"? Are you sure there are states that are privacy respecting enough to actually be able to, or have all the relevant states broken down walls between government agencies that would shield citizens from secret surveillance and registers?

> You're still just stating your opinions.

No, I'm talking about cryptography. That is, maths.

When I say that it is possible to encrypt a message in a way that only the receiver can read it, and the server relaying it cannot, it is not an opinion. I am stating a fact. Zero knowledge proofs are maths, too.

> What do you mean by "it is possible"?

I mean that there are maths that do exist that enable it. There is code that is already written that does it every day. It does exist.

But nobody can be arsed to spend a few minutes getting informed before complaining. It's not just cryptography: people who are very vocal against 5G usually believe that "it boils your blood" or some variant of it, people who are very vocal against vaccination usually have absolutely no idea how it works, that's just how it is. It is frustrating, I guess I just have to accept it.

Saying "it's not possible to do age verification in a privacy-preserving manner" is like saying "it's not possible to deploy 5G in a way that doesn't burn people": it is at best uninformed, possibly just manipulative. Sure, it's possible to burn someone with a strong enough radio signal. But the fact remains that it is possible to deploy 5G in a way that does not burn people, and 5G is nothing special in that regard (it's just "electromagnetic waves", which is a well-known physics concept).

There would be a sane debate to have around 5G (e.g. ultra-consumerism or whatever), but I have never, EVER heard it. The 5G debate is "uninformed people claiming it boils your blood" versus people who find it useful and rightly don't believe the bullshit claims of the first group.

The age verification debate is "uninformed people claiming that it is impossible" versus people who find it useful, and can rightly dismiss the claims of the first group, because really, it is possible.

I don't see how any of these grudges of yours are relevant to the question I asked to try and put you on track to make an argument I'd expect to move us in a fruitful direction.

There are a lot of things that most people in the street want that aren't even on the road map to happening, so you have to ask yourself why this thing (which isn't hardly anyone's top motivating issue) is gaining traction.

> this thing (which isn't hardly anyone's top motivating issue)

Do you have kids growing up with social media?

My experience is that parents with kids growing up with social media generally care about whether or not social media are bad for their kids. And generally, parents try to give kids a smartphone and access to social media as late as possible, generally when "everybody else has it" and it feels like it becomes counter-productive to make an outlier out of your kid.

I wouldn't say nobody cares. If anything, I think most parents would care a lot more about limiting access to social media than about privacy. It's pretty obvious that nobody gives a shit about privacy.

People who are actually interesting, are often aware of that fact and avoid surveillance at the moment. You can use tor/i2p, proper VPN setups, VMs, alternative mobile ROMs and other tech and cut most of the fingerprints, trackers and identification. Pretty sure the trash from state agencies doesn't like that.

But the current push from all sides to provide id for everything and remote attestation through Google and apple will make the alternatives very hard to use as it basically cuts such people from the economy altogether.

Adolescents, or kids? Would you say it's completely stupid to want to stop kids from watching porn, or accessing social media?

Did you grow up with free streaming platforms? Pretty sure many adolescents were accessing porn before those, though it was slightly less accessible.

I personally don't have a definitive opinion about porn (I feel like young kids obviously shouldn't have access to it, but it shouldn't be illegal to adults, but I don't know where the limit should be), but I feel like making it harder for kids to access social media makes sense.

I dunno, you have experience being a kid, right? Young kids are just not interested enough to look for porn, not to say figure out how to use VPN to access it. Lax restrictions like we have today are enough to stop porn from being forced on children who are not interested in it

It's not just "look for porn", it's "being exposed to stuff they shouldn't be exposed to".

E.g. the problem of social media is not that kid access information. It's more that kids get harassed by other kids.

it's not about porn, it's about power over all citizens.

Believe me, in some EU countries (like my country Poland) people are very sensitive for this kind of bullshit.

Last two times they tried to push other censorship/tracking laws (claiming as always "we have to, EU is making us") there were mass protests in every city and town.

In my own town of 5k people there were several hundred (500 people at least, probably more). And the previous govt backed down.

This topic seems to be coming back everytime certain countries (Denmark etc) hold the rotating EU presidency. Our current PM is certainly in the same EU clique that wants to push this so much, but it's an extremely unpopular position and he is already leading a weak minority coalition govt. It wouldn't take much to topple him, so he will not do anything like that (unless he is convicted people are distracted with some crisis, but that is where normal people come in. To keep watching what is being smuggled in).

I wonder why do voters in those countries that propose these laws tend to allow this to happen again and again.

It's because it's not about the opinion of voters, but about existing political powers that want to retain their power.

No matter what you (as population) say it will get implemented. If you don't, then they will put sanctions on Poland, withdraw financial partnerships, etc. Like with migrants, they are going to be sent there, even if Polish people vote against.

No matter if you are in favor or against, raising the topic will just make you socially be isolated or even legally punished in some places.

Sad for democracy and free speech.

EDIT: clarified about migrant policy and the decision of countries to choose or not

Poland and other nations should be carefull with handling of imigration, as history shows.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1938_expulsion_of_Polish_Jews_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emigration_of_Jews_from_Nazi_G...

I think you are confusing democracy with anarchy. There is tons of free speech in Europe, and it is the most democratic of all countries that are alternative. UK is still very democratic country. The generation of politicians from zero rate era had gotten carried away on certain topics (defence, immigration) and now we have to deal with this. they also have undermined public trust by acting the way they did in covid, to an extent that any new pandemic is likely to be way worse just because no body will trust the government again for a long time.

But there is a problem with kids today having pretty easy access to all kinds of nasty shit on internet, and it isnt like it was in 90s and 00s. 10 year olds on social media is fucked. I dont really care for blocking internet on anything, yet it does appear that simple age verification is necessary for access to certain services.

most people are just super mad that they wont be able to watch porn or their favourite show thats on netflix or whatever. BUt thats not what the article was about. Read a little bit. Comparing EU to fucking Russia is insane here.

Why is it insane? You get a police visit and fine for posting mean memes in Germany

Poland has a fresh memory on communism and censorship. Sadly the alternative to your current PM is PiS, who banned abortion, so basically christian conservatives with some fascist ideas, not very different than the ones currently running the US.

To the EU regulators: we don't need another Stasi, we already have Google and Meta to worry about, thank you.

Also, to regulate in my native language is just a nice way to say the f word, if this conversation is about porn.

You don't really believe this is about porn?

The title is also the exact title for that paper’s chapter.

You are right at pointing out that the paper is overall presenting the subject in a balanced manner, unfortunately it seems a bad choice was made when it came to that specific sentence, that gives a venue for it to be fed in the outrage machine.

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/ATAG/2026/7826...

In that specific sentence the source is cited (via hyperlink). So even if you read it out of all context you can still find out the source is UK's Children’s Commissioner Dame Rachel de Souza who said it, not "the EU" (whatever that means).

For this "story" to gain legs, someone must have pulled that sentence out of content without mentioning the source and then added some misleading context for the outrage.

It has been chosen as a chapter title.

In my view, it lends more authority to that statement over the other citations in that chapter.

I am inclined to take this as a honest editorial mistake: adding a ? at the end would have been the right choice.

I might be a bit lost on what you/we mean by context. For me, it’s the original pdf from the EU, no quotes.

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/ATAG/2026/7826...

Showing children naked humans is a horrible crime.

Bombing children is OK and we happily produce and deliver all the weapons needed for that.

Patterns of an ill society.

"Children's Commissioner for England"... that's not the EU. Really not the EU - they had a whole election and years-long process to leave the EU.

The point is that does not stop the EU from quoting the Children's Commissioner for England on the first page of this document:

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/ATAG/2026/7826...

This needs a new "law of headlines": whenever it's the EU saying something, it's never the EU that said that.

Even the, it's incredibly vague at best, equivalent to "The USA said that", which only makes sense in a context where the relevant spokespeople are well-defined (such as a UN assembly or something), but who is the general spokesperson for the USA or the EU?

Usually things like these are qualified like "the Department of Defense of the USA stated X".

But you single out just one paper. If you include all paper and discussions the picture is super-clear, and the title is not misleading at all. This has to be said.

> Of course I'm not saying the EU won't regulate VPNs

The word choice is quite revealing. You write "regulate VPNs". To me this is not "regulation" at all - it is restriction or factually forbidding it. It is newspeak language here if we dampen it via nicer-sounding words. It also distracts from the main question: why the sudden attack by EU lobbyists against VPNs?

This is the only paper that is presented as a source for this statement. I'm not the one singling it out.

> why the sudden attack by EU lobbyists against VPNs?

Live sports, they’re already assaulting internet infrastructure in various EU member states (eg. La Liga forcing Spanish ISPs to block cloudflare IPs during matches). With this in mind it seems less a case of surveillance state and more a case of corporate state capture.

If someone wants a guaranteed riot in a Latin country, they just need to somehow mess around with football.

This is how waters are tested and potential negative reactions are probed.

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