No, it's upto the individuals to police their or their childrens internet usage, have family computer in place they can monitor, children should have special childrens phones that are locked down with parents configuring it, today parents are abdicating responsibility, leaving schools to feed, potty train, how to clean teeth and how to behave.

Whats next expecting schools to provide beds and rooms to sleep in, soon babies will be handed to state and raised by the state, is it any wonder we now have a nanny state in many countries, people are getting lazy and filthy, spitting in streets, peeing and pooping in streets, dumping rubbish in streets

We NEED to Protect The Children which is WHY we're SO LUCKY to have a President who is SO KEEN to PROTECT Child Rapists like Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell!

Government sets up page to verify age. You head to it, no referrer. Age check happens by trusted entity (your government, not some sketchy big tech ass), they create a signed cert with a short lifespan to prevent your kid using the one you created yesterday and without the knowledge which service it is for. It does not contain a reference to your identity. You share that cert with the service you want to use, they verify the signature, your age, save the passing and everyone is happy. Your government doesn't know that you're into ladies with big booties, the big booty service doesn't know your identity and you wank along in private.

But oh no, that wouldn't work because think of the... I have no clue.

Yes. I had always worried about the copyright industry. That was the big money pushing for censorship. Controlling access and exchange of information is part of their business model and even personal ideology. But I don't know how much this has actually to do with them, and how much is simply the will to power.

What I did not see coming at all was how the left would completely 180 on these issues. That, at least, I blame on the copyright industry.

Right wing people have screeched about "the intolerant left" forever, but I always ignored the obvious hypocrisy. I took it as a debate on what is permissible in polite society. But now Europe is at a point where there is simply a consensus against free speech. Only the most illiberal forces will be able to use these legal weapons to full effect. That will be the extreme right.

but with something like Mastodon, it doesn’t really work. Like this bill was written and passed by people who don’t know shit about fuck about tech. Several Lemmy and Mastodon instances have shut down/Geoblocked the UK because of this

So they knew what they were doing. Age verification is about removing all sources that can't be controlled.

Despite what they think, we are human beings too over here. That's my point.

I don't care about the politics of nation vs nation.

I care about humanity's liberty as a whole.

Nations are shit. Because the only ones in power are typically the ones who want to be. And there's no one worse to hand power to, than one who craves it.

My point is that you can't build a completely teenager-proof system. Even if most parents uphold the most unimpeachable password discipline, someone's going to put a password on a post-it note near their computer, and have their child see the piece of paper, or use their dog's name despite their child having also met the family dog.

The original comment I was replying to was framing the issue as teenagers being allowed to watch porn versus no teenager ever seeing porn and maybe some freedom is sacrificed to do that, which doesn't match the real-world debate. If freedoms are sacrificed just to make it a hassle for teenagers to see porn, that's much less compelling whether or not you see it as a worthwhile goal.

As for what a teenager with access to their parents' bank password would do, if they're not a moron, they'll realise that spending their parents' money will leave lots of evidence (e.g. that they have extra stuff, their parents have less money than expected in their account, and there's an unexpected purchase from The Lego Group on the bank statement), and so they're guaranteed to end up in trouble for it. It's not any different to a child taking banknotes from their parent's wallet. On the other hand, using it to prove adulthood, if it was truly untraceable like adults would want, wouldn't leave a paper trail.

Say you’re trash without saying you’re trash

You racist antisemitic terrorist.

Well to be fair the left in the usa does have another reason to see the libertarian party as just another right wing party. They vote republican when it comes down to D vs R

Despite what who think? I don't think there are people who think people in USA are not human beings. (Or if they are, they are less than one percent of the world population... Of course within 8 billion people you will find a proponent for any opinion...)

But yeah, since you care about humanity's liberty as a whole, you could maybe kindly stop undermining that goal by assuming that what is done by under 5% of the population on this planet is the standard that the remaining 95 % are following.

You can't build a completely teenager-proof system. But you can build a system that is almost completely teenage-proof. And that's definitely good enough!

All such systems exist only to support parents in their parenting. It gets easier keeping your children safe and developing well if the amount of ways the teenagers can be idiots is narrowed down.

and yet they're doing a fucking terrible job at it (source, I'm using a VPN, something people in the Lords didn't even know was a thing until it was too late). It would be funny if it wasn't my reality.

Nah. OCs a whinging boomer.

"Screaming" "People like me" "liberties eroding before our very eyes"

It's like he's never read a history book. Or travelled outside his state.

I'm not saying I'm for age verification. I'm just saying if it were for it, there'd be solutions.

What I wrote I did while being barely awake in five minutes. Sure it needs work. But there'd be ways to do it without a camera up your butt.

You're right. I shouldn't have responded in anger. My bad. I get frustrated when I feel like people are talking down to me simply because I'm a USian, and I let it get the better of me.

Funnily enough that is roughly the implementation the EU seems to be working on.

The EU approach to age verification

The European Commission is working towards an EU-harmonised approach to age verification.

Shaping Europe’s digital future (digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu)

On a side-note. I do not consider the government to be a trusted party. Whatever solution gets implemented needs to not provide the government any information that they can use for mass surveillance.

The two main requirements in my view are:

• The website that needs your age shouldn't get to know your identity. They only get to verify your age.
• The government age verification shouldn't get to know what service you are requesting access for. They only provide age verification.

Edit: You mention the certificate being short-lived, but one of the concerns mentioned in the proposed implementation for the EU age verification states that if that window is too short it can be used to determine identity.

My point is that any solution here will be used for tracking, because that's in the interests of both regulators and regulated entities. It's not going to solve the original problem because kids are great at finding workarounds, and it will cause harm to those who follow the rules.

I also could devise a technical solution here that respects users' privacy and is effective, but once it's implemented, it will be changed to violate privacy. That's how these things work.

There's no problem, so we don't need one. We got by just fine without age verification on the internet for decades

As I said, I fundamentally disagree. Even if you can make a nearly-teenager-proof website (and so far, your example has been something that most of the people I was at school with could have beaten aged thirteen), teenagers can just go to a different website, so the system is only ever as teenager-resistant as it is difficult to find a website that doesn't care. Most vaguely competent teenagers know how to find pirate sites with illegally-hosted TV, movies and music (even if they're not techy, one of their friends just has to tell them a URL and they can visit it). Governments have had minimal success stopping online piracy even when aided by multi-billion-dollar copyright-holding companies, so there's no realistic reason to think they'll have any more success stopping porn sites with non-compliant age checks.