As far as I can tell, there is no requirement to be a UK citizen to answer this – if you are, were, or could be resident in the UK I urge you to fill it out and help provide a voice of reason...

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/growing-up-in-th...

I guess since I complain about Mozilla a lot for their past 5-10 years (minimum) of poor management decisions, I should give them their due when they do come out with a statement of support on our rights.

Honest question: if you tell Pornhub "now you will be fined heavily if you let 10-year old kids access porn", won't Pornhub implement some kind of age verification?

How else would the platform "address the root cause"?

One side of this is driven by a bunch of not too reputable think tanks behind the scenes who persuaded a couple of fringe academics to agree with them and push for it via the civil service. The government is taking bad, paid for advice. I don't know what the agenda is there but there is one and I reckon it's commercial. Probably a consortium of businesses wanting to create a market they can get into.

However the security services do not agree with the government or the think tanks and actually promote advice contrary to the regulators. They will ultimately win.

Attacking the regulators and revealing who is behind all this is what we should be doing.

If a government has the ability to fine content providers for providing content to its citizens, why accept IP verification is good enough to determine the user’s jurisdiction and not fine them anyway for providing the content?

This would probably block most of the internet, and allow access only to sites that are validated as being safe. This would put a lot of pressure on sites and service providers to ensure safety, such as children-only walled gardens within their broader services.

We already have piecemeal attempts at something like this through on device private age restriction software, but it’s not organised at the state level, and I think it’s not effective enough as a result.

If legally enforced it could be made into a pretty effective system that would give adults freedom and anonymity and provide safety for children, while pushing the costs of child safety onto the platforms, which is where it belongs. If you want to cater to children, prove that you can make it on to the whitelist. Otherwise that’s an audience you’re just not able to access.

Could you, my wonderful Western friends, do that again?

I mean, all of it is even on video and largely on YouTube.

That's what they keep reducing it to. They're also making it a false dichotomy of sorts, but in reality it's a gradient of possibilities. For example, VPNs aren't like Tor in that they can't really resist "NSA" level global wiretap monitoring in any meaningful way. Or even ISP-level data-analysis driven investigations.

It's also important to correlate any privacy protections VPNs provide, with a real-world pre-internet equivalent. paper mail for example has always been subject to Mitm by the authorities. It is possible to divulge who visited what site, and at what time, and only directly to the authorities, and make that disclosure public (after gag orders expire, if any are issued).

You can use VPNs for privacy against all sorts of creepy eyes, but your local government being considered one of those hostile actors is the threat model that's under attack here.

I would argue for example that the pre-internet equivalent would be two people chatting in the privacy of one of their homes. A bit of a stretch, but alright. But in that there must be the element that the two persons are able to identify each other positively. If one of them is harmed by the other, the victim can identify the attacker to the authorities and pursue justice. How can that be done with VPNs? If middle-actors can't snoop, then can logs on both ends positively identify the other party? Was there a common way pre-internet, where people anonymously gathered and discussed things, with capability to harm each other, but without the authorities being able to do anything about it after the fact?

If the authorities are able to gain access to a private key, or some other proof of possession of one end of the connection, can the VPN provider, the network, or the protocol disclose the identity of the source of traffic on the other end?

I'm only making these arguments to point out how nuanced the topic is. The false dichotomy of all-or-nothing for VPNs is silly. this is moving towards an outright ban of VPNs with criminal consequence, and with that all other similar tech (including Tor) and privacy measures go down the toilet. Would you rather have that or propose a nuanced compromise one jurisdiction at a time?

I get this is just PR for Mozilla though.

Does Mozilla not understand that this is the exact reason why the UK wants to forbid them?

Historically they were fairly smart at doing it subtly but the mask slipped during Covid and they never really put it back on.

Also - outside the HN bubble this stuff isn’t even unpopular. Normies supported covid lockdowns and they don’t want their kids watching porn either.

The people yearn to be ruled and nannied

What about just banning phones for children? Could we ever make that work? It would be like cigarette bans except we now have 5 year olds addicted to tobacco and addict parents who don't want to make them go cold turkey.

Public libraries and schools can be used for genuine research purposes, but not addictive shit. And implemented ad blockers at the network level.

Practically speaking, when I look at the actual number of people affected by VPN I estimate that:

  - Very low: Protecting political activists and dissidents
  - Low: Circumvention of overzealous blocking and surveillance
  - Low-to-Medium: Hiding abusive and malicious behavior
  - Medium: Additional layers of trust and network security (mostly business related, which makes it tangental to the consumer VPN market)
  - VERY High: Enabling piracy and avoiding geo-content restrictions (no judgment on good-vs-bad, just asserting magnitude)

So... conundrum! If I take the position that piracy-related stuff isn't a net drag and that business VPN use is fundamentally a separate beast, VPNs in this context are hard to justify.

For a start, you should consider this fact: Privacy for a bad actor goes directly against the security for citizens and good actors.

So when you talk about privacy you are making an assumption that it is contributing to safety. But for whom? Bad actors or good actors? Without such qualification, you are just talking lofy-sounding but meaningless ideals.