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by txrx0000·9mo ago·view on hn ↗
A device-side IP filter locked behind a password that parents can configure in the device's settings would be much more effective and easier to implement than censoring the Internet. This should be the default solution, yet it's never brought up for whatever reason.

Not to mention these online content censorship laws for kids are wrong in principle because parents are supposed to be in control of how they raise each of their own kids, not the government or other people.

And these laws make authoritarian surveillance and control much easier. It's hard to not see this as the main objective at this point. And even if it isn't, this level of stupidity is harmful.

9 comments
The goal is controling the flow of information online. "protecting the children" may or may not be a sincere concern but ultimately censorship is what is desired here.
Same way the government needs to read all your emails because some terrorist on the other side of the world may or may not be using email as well to communicate.
Ultimately information is power, especially now. Governments naturally gravitate to wanting more and more power. Authoritarian types are all around, and their power is growing in the current political climate of America as they see a method that works, turning Americans against each other and creating national scares which in turn can be used to gain more control over every aspect of our lives
Whenever "think of the children" shows up as a pretend-genuine argument, you may bet on it being a scam/grift.

Read about the infamous EU's chat control and lobbying behind it: https://mullvad.net/en/blog/mullvad-vpn-present-and-then

pedo and terror the 2 excuses
It’s almost like they need these to exist.
I think Hanlon's razor probably applies here. There's no way the average Wisconsin legislator understands this bill.
No. Stop using Hanlon's razor as a magic word that lets those in power evade responsibility for turning tech against people. They already excel at dodging consequences without anyone resorting to lazy two word arguments in their defense.

It doesn't take a computer genius to understand the broader implications this has on civil society. If they genuinely lack the insight to comprehend this, then they certainly wouldn’t be using children as a shield.

I'm not saying they should get a pass for being incompetent. I'm just saying we shouldn't lose our heads theorizing malice.
It's not theoretical - governments all over the world have attempted censorship and surveillance for thousands of years. This isn't some new thing that we're all cooking up right now. We, and they, already know what this is for.
how about Asimov's 3rd Law of Stupid: sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice
Fair enough, but still worth being accurate.
Yep, "think of the children" has become the go-to excuse for all kinds of overreach
It is the objective, it's always been the objective. The worst part is that I bet these people don't even think of themselves as authoritarian so much as they stumble into it through a combination of selfishness, ignorance, and complete disregard for ethics. They like money and power, more information means more of both, darn the torpedos, tap the lines, hit the gas and all of a sudden it's oops all facism.
I think putting parents in control is the right path, but will reveal a sad fact.

Many parents aren't taking time to be in control, and no amount of legislation will fix that.

Or the sadder fact that it's not actually about protecting kids.
Honestly it should be good news because the kids never needed protecting in the first place. If the solution wasn't censorship they would give zero fucks.
I disagree that legislation can't help. Fundamentally there's an education disconnect and unnecessary friction in setting up parental controls. Governments can better educate parents about the risks, and give them better tools to filter/monitor content their children watch (eg at the device level). Being a parent is hard and it's possible to make this part easier imo.

eg consider child-proof packaging and labeling laws for medication, which dramatically reduced child mortality due to accidental drug misuse.

Well the law could be simple - “every computer sold must have a prominently displayed ‘parental choice’ screen on first boot that lets the owner specify whether this device will be used by a child and give the parents and option to block adult content”
Parents are already in control.
This is 100% the response. I work with kids in mental health and the “kick the can to the parents” response is so shortsighted

Apple and android controls aren’t that difficult to understand. Roblox parental controls aren’t that difficult to understand. Could it be simpler by unifying these things under one framework? Sure - I’ve worked with tons of parents who fall under the trap that Roblox is safe because they set iOS parental controls. I feel for them because they aren’t “tech” people and apple conditions them to expect a setting to be universal across the operating system, so it’s quite a shock when they find out their child has been texting with some groomer from Roblox chat.

The parents who are doing that will continue to do that. Improving those controls will help those parents and I agree efforts should be made for them. But for every one of those parents I encounter I get about 4-5 more who don’t bother to set any kind of parental control or filter on their children’s devices. When their 9 year old starts talking about pornhub and I give them resources on setting up parental controls it almost always falls on deaf ears. They simply don’t give a fuck. They can’t be bothered to spend 20 minutes figuring out how to set it up, even if I offer to walk them through it.

It is the new form of parental neglect, the modern version of a latchkey kid

Yes but massive censorship and the constant surveillance of children is also not good for the children ultimately. We need to bring the question of “does this help create a world that we want children to grow up in?”

Are we really going to argue “since some parents won’t adequately parent their children, we’re going to create a massive censorship and surveillance apparatus and the Government will tightly control what everyone is allowed to view or talk about online”?

I might dryly suggest that it is prudent preparation for the computing environments they will encounter in their future jobs. Like the way expensive prep schools have children wearing business casual...
Android doesn't have parental controls, does it? The closest thing I'm aware of is Family Link, which is a Google service that requires parent and child to have a Google account.
It'll take legal responsibility being placed on the parent, and one parent being prosecuted and convicted for child neglect, in order for that attitude to change.
A technolo-- legislative solution to a social symptom.
A trivial amount of legislation can fix that. Law reads: ISPs must implement implement parental blocks by default, exceptions may only be made on a per-device basis. Parental controls must also be enabled on public wifi. Easy as that. It doesn't matter how lazy you are, actively going and turning something off is more effort than not.
>ISPs must implement implement parental blocks by default

This is already the case in the UK. We discovered another sad fact. Parents will suddenly develop the technical literacy to turn parental controls off because it's inconveniencing them, but won't bother to fine grain the control to make it safe for their children.

These are religious fanatics trying to ban porn because they believe it's evil. All the rest is dressing to advance that cause and isn't worth spending too much time trying to make sense of.

They'd latch on to whatever reason they'd think would stick.

You forgot to add they also believe the education sites are evil brain rot.
Don't forget they will brand anything they don't like as porn/bad for children. Like gay people daring to exist.
Whether it's intentional or not, these laws open the door to mass surveillance under the guise of "protection"
IP filter? So what you do when you block the entire cloudflare, CloudFront, Amazon and Google cloud ip ranges?

What's left?

There are better solution than blocking IPs.

Yeah, we can have fancy NN-based filters, but I think even a simple IP blocker with some carefully-made presets would go a long way.

Anyways, the main point I was making is the filtering should be done on-device at the parents' discretion, if they really wanted to protect their children. We can give them that feature and eliminate an excuse for authoritarian laws at the same time. This doesn't even require legislation, we can just do it if enough people working on operating systems agree.

I have worked in cloud consulting for a little over five years. A lot of companies specifically ask that we blocked traffic from cloud providers. It’s a built in feature of AWS WAF.

Ironically enough, that meant when I was working at AWS, I sometimes couldn’t access a site that I was working on for a client when I went into the office for a business trip (I worked remotely).

This has existed for well over a decade for iOS. I don’t use Android so I can’t speak to it.
> And even if it isn't, this level of stupidity is harmful.

How much more proof do we need that we're speedrunning the authoritarianism and frankly we're already somewhat authoritarian, it's just pluralism for now. Wait until the elites eat each other and only one dictator is left.

> parents are supposed to be in control of how they raise each of their own kids

You realize that a lot of parents support this sort of thing because they are not technically sophisticated enough to control it themselves? Or they simply think that it has no place in polite society? That is why politicians enact these laws, because they are hearing from constituents that they want it.

Excuse my somewhat peeved tone, but if parents aren't capable of pressing one (1) button on a iPhone/Android setup screen to turn on the parental controls and content blocking, then perhaps we should be rethinking their capacity to raise children.
> You realize that a lot of parents support this sort of thing because they are not technically sophisticated enough to control it themselves?

We can make it so that it's as easy as changing the settings on their child's phone and then setting a password to lock that setting. The technical barrier isn't high.

> Or they simply think that it has no place in polite society?

That doesn't justify giving the government the tools to crush free speech on the Internet, which threatens the very existence of polite society. The current wave of authoritarianism around the world is a direct consequence of undemocratic governance systems on the Internet. In hindsight, it was kind of our fault. Failing to foresee its civilization-scale impact, we did not design the Internet with democratic principles in mind. This eventually resulted in large social media and cloud services platforms with enough users to sway elections, that operate under opaque centralized moderation and curation mechanisms. This became a real problem when smartphones were invented and most of human communication suddenly got moved online: freedom of speech has been de facto damaged for almost two decades now.

But it's a problem that can reverse itself, if we can figure out a way to neutralize the Internet's implicit incentives that encourage the centralization of compute and storage (which is equivalent to the centralization of power when most communication occurs online). And as you might guess, such solutions require a free enough Internet to create and deploy. That's why we must push back against these Internet control laws in the meantime, otherwise governments will simply use these legal tools to suppress attempts to decentralize the Internet, and we'd end up with authoritarian regimes all around the world.