It’s yet another step in seeing the Internet becoming owned by big corporations. Only big corporations can implement these things.
Art, creativity, people doing internet things as a hobby, that is dying more and more everyday.
This is the second time in my life that Labour have gained power after a long Conservative tenure, only to dive straight into enacting policies that were more right-wing than their predecessors.
It’s less of a left - right thing (that’s mainly economics). It paternalism Vs liberty thing. Labour have always had a very strong “we must protect the populace” theme to their policies. Conservatives have it too, but they want to do it in a different way.
Sadly it’s a really difficult thing to stand against. Who wants to be labelled the person enabling paedophiles, when all you want is the right to private communication.
To be honest I don’t think much of this is about catching or preventing paedos, and is just straight up authoritarianism.
You’re right. It’s not, but that’s what you’re labelled when you stand against it.
It’s important to continue standing against it nonetheless, and not be intimidated out of action.
Meme photo of two astronauts in space, one holding a gun to back of the other’s head. It is overlayed with the text “Always has been.”
Part of that is allowing labels to be so powerful. Someone doesn’t have to watch kiddie porn or molest children to be branded a pedophile, but when you have that label for someone, it’s implied that’s what they did. We saw this same shit during the Bush years with the “terrorism” label. We’re actually seeing it again with Luigi Mangione and people protesting at Tesla dealerships. People don’t care about reality if there’s simple branding that wipes critical thinking away.
To correct one thing, the left-right political spectrum is based on authority. It goes back to the French Revolution, in which the nobility - favoring top-down power hierarchies - literally occupied the right side of the assembly hall while the revolutionaries - favoring true equality and egality - sat on the left.
This cannot be separated into distinct domains since power is wealth and wealth is power. The political compass fallacy is, and always was, nothing more than rightist propaganda to muddy language and ideology in an effort to hold on to their wealth and power.
Paternalism vs liberty. Tell me more. I haven’t heard of this comparison before.
The full spectrum is really more like “authoritarian vs libertarian”. Political policy should really be split into two different spectrums. On one spectrum, you have financial policy. On the other, you have social policy. The two normally get lumped together because politicians campaign on both simultaneously. But in reality, they’re two separate policies. So the political spectrum should look less like a single left/right line, and more like an X/Y graph with individual points for each person’s ideology. Something more like this:
On this graph, as you go farther left, the government has more ownership and provides more, (and individuals own less because the government provides more for their needs). As you go farther up the chart, social policy gets more authoritarian. So for example, something on the far right bottom corner would be the Cyberpunk 2077/The Outer Worlds end-stage capitalist where megacorps inevitably own everything and have their own private laws.
Once you separate the two policies into a graph (instead of just a left/right line) it becomes clear why “small government” doesn’t necessarily correspond to “fewer laws” when dealing with politicians.
I assume “Republican” on this diagram is not used in the contemporary American sense. Otherwise it would be somewhere up in that little grey cloud.
In any case, official US politics takes place entirely within the top right quadrant, and UK politics seems to have retreated there too. Canada is in danger of getting up there as well. And we don’t have any mechanism to vote our way out of that box, so change will have to come from action outside of electoral politics.
The precise location of individual points really depends on personal biases, but I agree that the “Republican” point is wrong on this chart; Pretty much all of America’s political discussion takes place on the right side of the graph.
I think it’s being used in the traditional sense, not the contemporary American sense.
How did neo-liberalism make it to the left?
I didn’t bother actually checking the individual points, because I was simply using it for illustrative purposes. The actual location of the points is largely up to interpretation, based on personal biases and viewpoints. For instance, plenty of .ml posters would likely object to calling Leninism highly authoritarian, or lumping it in with Maoism. But this particular compass does both of those.
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That’s a political compass, and it’s still missing several political axes.
Around our local voting season there’s actually a online test to check which parties are more aligned with the person values and it puts things into a graph like this. It’s very useful
Illusion of choice.
The OSA was brought in by the tories. Labour agree with it as well. Both of them are authoritarian bastards.
Yeah, it’s a lot of admin for most small providers to be bothered with. Less of a hit to just block the whole UK.
Which is why big tech is actively lobbying for these laws because they know that they will be the only ones who can comply and therefore exist.
Perfect response. This gets the message across, “governments of the world, the Internet doesn’t need you, you need the Internet”.
There’s a UK Parliament petition to repeal the Online Safety act. There’s no guarantee it’ll do anything but might be worth a try for anyone in the UK.
Don’t forget to write to your MP - being polite but angry helps. Explain the issues, shortcomings and why you feel this should be repealed and a better user-friendly and privacy respecting alternative needs to be found BEFORE implementing stupid asinine knee-jerk legislation like this.
My poor MP is getting it in the jugular because they boasted about working in data security and I’m exploiting the hell out of that statement so they can’t easily weasel their way out of it.
Part of me wants every website to do this. The UK just gets blocked from majority of the internet then people in the UK can get angry and rebel.
The great firewall of starmer
At this point Dark-web tech needs an upgrade, we might just need a “2nd internet”
i2p
How about Gemini? https://geminiprotocol.net/
Gemini is a group of technologies similar to the ones that lie behind your familiar web browser. Using Gemini, you can explore an online collection of written documents which can link to other written documents. The main difference is that Gemini approaches this task with a strong philosophy of “keep it simple” and “less is enough”. This allows Gemini to simply sidestep, rather than try and probably fail to solve, many of the problems plaguing the modern web, which just seem to get worse and worse no matter how many browser add-ons or well meaning regulations get thrown at them.
How it applies to geolocation and server hosting in light of the OSA I really have no clue. But it’s an interesting underground hacker/tinker type alternative.
Imagine if people could just choose what country they’re browsing from
Not a long term solution.
Yeah, we’re all mad, fuck the suits and all that.
But why does the distinction between “real-world adult material” and “creative, non-realistic”, “artistic, animated works” that “do no harm” matter? Last time I checked, realistic adult material can be just as artistic, and the harm done by negligently letting children watch it seems comparable.
Are they in favour of age verification for “uncreative, realistic” pornography, or is the real distinction just between real-life and online?
I interpreted it as “can’t possibly be doing harm to the people in the video” - eg as much of mainstream porn can do - since there are none if everything is animated fiction
And that is the correct interpretation.
Admittedly, I’m pretty sure UK did this with the underage consumers in mind, not the industry actors, for whom both sorts of porn would have a similiar impact. (I’d assume)
Personally though, the constant repeating to me sounded comedic and they were making fun of how seriously we’re taking nude drawings with this, which sounds silly even if it’s justified.
Yeah, the “it’s just cartoons so it’s not harmful” argument falls flat pretty quickly. There are much better arguments to be made for why the law is dumb.
I think it’s more about the legal distinction between drawn and ‘real’ porn.
TBH “negligently letting children watch it” seems like a sensless statement to me. The onus should be on parents to filter their kids’ internet environments, not literally every accessible site on the open internet (which are never going to comply with a patchwork of age verification regs).
It’s the same schtick you hear from pedophiles in defense of their child sex dolls and it’s unsurprising to see it coming from rule34 in particular considering they serve up a lot of that content in cartoon form.
There’s a lot of rule34 comic sites out there, I just found out. Which one is this? Just for research and background.
hand wringing over objectionable video games is why queer artists are now having their platforms removed. if you dont want to see certain kinds of fictional porn, then either avoid the website it is hosted on, or make an account and edit your blacklist. also, if youre worried about your children having access to gay yiff, then restrict their access
My networking knowledge may be out of date, but can’t you get around region locked sites with VPNs or Tor?
I was in Turkey in July 2019. Wikipedia was blocked. I had to use Tor to access it. On installation I think I had to tick a special box that said something like “use flux capacitor bridge for blablabla countries like China and Turkey”
Though In that case, Wikipedia didn’t give a fuck if you were accessing it from Tor. The government did.
I know some sites block tor/VPN access for various reasons
You can
But most people will not go to those lengths, esp not kids.
You vastly underestimate the interest young people can have into things, especially into forbidden things, especially when the workaround is trivial and works with a few clics, no tech skills required.
Will this become a new venue for scam? Most likely. But kids motivation vs. a very easy “fix” is not what’s gonna stop them. Adult surveillance would be way better.
All it takes is one kid to work it out and it’ll be common knowledge in that school within a week.
Doesn’t proton offer a free vpn with limits?
Also, a vpn is pretty cheap. I wouldn’t say that it’s kids that would be using it, it would be adults who don;t want to upload their picture.
Yes however they are literally move all their infrastructure to the UK so they won’t be an option soon.
Windscribe is a thin too, but since they are Canadian and Canada is making stupid political deals with the US lately, it can’t be relied on either.
Damn, U.K. is really getting destabilized fast. Law changes, immigration, censoring and now monitoring? Is this what happens when you leave EU and “lose” in the modern war?
The UK is destroying privacy of chaps! The people who want to watch porn, without being tracked! And now they have to fall under the VPN!