big85

It's bizarre to see 8GB spoken of as barely sufficient for basic uses. I remember when the baseline was measured in megabytes.

If you don't fight government overreach now, it becomes permanent.

There's also Nectarine Demoscene Radio: https://www.scenestream.net/demovibes/

No, I want to know specifically.

The Wikipedia entry on Chat Control doesn't go into enough detail on what exactly it does, only the history of its legislative process. Can someone update it?

Parental controls. Client-side blocking of content. Apple's parental controls are so good that parents give young children unsupervised internet access--the entire generation if iPad babies. Current iPads even use on-device AI to detect nudity in photos and prevent them from being taken, sent, recieved, or viewed.

The existing paradigm is on-device parental controls. It's worked for the past 30 years, and the alternative is forcing everyone to show government ID to use websites.

I vaguely recall a story about an employee who discovered that their company's sales department was acquiring a lot of new customers to hit some metrics, but rarely actually closing the deal. The employee spent months chasing up incomplete sales orders, and discovered that the sales department's apparent success was illusory.

Most VPN companies won't implement age verification, because their purpose is privacy. This is really an attempt to ban VPNs. This won't be popular when 70% of the population uses VPNs.

UK government has been talking about digital ID for a while now. The existing verification methods are too vulnerable to cheating (fake beards, fake ID, borrow dad's credit card, etc...), so the logical next step is direct government ID numbers. The goal is to link all online activity to a unique identifier to make it easier to punish dissent.

You don’t. You can’t. So everyone gets carded.

Exactly. A little at a time. First it's adult sites, because if you need to show ID to buy alcohol, shouldn't you need ID to buy pornography? Once that's accepted, expand the sphere of control to non-adult sites too by redefining everything as 16+.

I suspect something like this is on the way, in the long term. Every site has some Cloudflare captcha or the like to guard against the AI scraper bots. Eventually, we may need some kind of token which is only issued to real humans.

<meta name="RATING" content="RTA-5042-1996-1400-1577-RTA" />

I wonder why the rating code is so complex. Pornhub.com has this code enabled, but it also uses a simpler <meta name="rating" content="adult">. 4chan also uses the latter.

We have parental controls on devices. The change forced by the UK government is to give control to corporations, instead of the parents.

Parents are much better at knowing their own kid's age than corporations are. Teens keep fooling the age verification (pointing the camera at a video game character, using fake ID, even drawing beards on their face with a pen). But they aren't going to fool their own mother, and they don't need to trust ID verification startup with photographs of everbody's teenage kids to do it.

About 2 million adults in the UK don't have government-issued photo ID. Certainly many 16-17 year olds will have trouble verifying their age. They're blocking huge sectors of the UK population from being able to use the internet normally.

Indeed. I don't see why the verification process has to be done once per user per website, instead of once per user. That maximizes costs, inconvenience, privacy risks, and compliance failures.

This is bizarre, then, because the on-device Apple system just enables the existing parental controls by default, while the online verification systems are easily cirvumvented.

There's still the issue of how to verify the user to give them that 1 bit. The current tools do not trust the user or the user's device, because the user could lie or modify the software on their device. But once my ID leaves the device, it becomes a privacy issue. You also have the problem that every pre-2026 device no longer functions with any site that requires the 1 bit.

Then enable parental controls on your children's devices. But don't enable it on my device, because I'm an adult.

The actual goal, of course, is to create pretext to ban VPN services which don't ID their customers.

Quite right. Around 2 million UK adults don't have photo ID, mostly concentrated among poorer and less educated people, and many of those have difficulty getting credit card for the same reason. The UK is violating their basic ECHR rights to freedom of speech, freedom of assocation, and the peaceful enjoyment of their property, and it's unnecessary because we already have parental controls.

Ah, but there are plenty of folk etymologies which, although they make a lot of logical sense, aren't true.

(For what it's worth, I don't get that sense.)

On-device nudity detection relies on machine-learning models that lean on the dedicated silicon built into recent phones, and older devices lack the neural processing and memory to run that kind of model without wrecking battery life and speed.

I'm beginning to suspect Apple complied in advance because their new devices have image-recognitions technology, but their competitors don't (particularly old hand-me down devices). Build a safety feature, have it made mandatory, and leverage the government to outlaw your competitors!

I hear the CPU fan spins up when you hit the Start menu now.

We have a solution for that: parental controls. The new feature is that parental controls are enabled by default and cannot be disabled without the phone manufacturer's consent. The upcoming feature is that this also applies to non-adult sites like Facebook and YouTube. It's nothing less than the end of the free, open, and anonymous internet.

YouTube has angered MPs and peers by bombarding them with adverts that suggest it is up to parents rather than tech companies to restrict teenagers’ screen time.

On a daily basis they've got a new idea to mess with our devices. Will users have to pass ID verification to avoid screen time limits too? Why is everything that used to be Parental Controls being made mandatory?

I have to get off this site before the tech news gives me an aneurysm. Let me give a prediction. To access the internet at all, you will need ID linked to government identity by some kind of token, the goal being to make it impossible post anything that can't be tracked to an individual. A bunch of major services are going to abandon the UK entirely to avoid the paperwork, but it won't matter.

Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker is about this idea. Set during the Cold War, the theory is that no human will choose nuclear retaliation if attacked, since it means mutual annihilation. However, American nuclear doctrine at the time assumes the threat of retaliation is the only thing deterring an attack. They attempt to solve this by building an AI which will retaliate, but are baffled when it too refuses to return fire.

Parental Controls don't bother me. What bothers me is that they should be enabled on my own device against my wishes!

No, it's much worse than you suggest. Quoting the government:

The government therefore wants Apple and Google to block nudity across the whole device by default, so they can only be deactivated via age assurance.

All smartphones and tablets will be required to detect and block adult content on the device. You can avoid it by showing photo ID, but it's bizarre that the default state should be to assume the user is not an adult until proven otherwise.

Article 1 of the ECHR guarantees that "every natural or legal person is entitled to the peaceful enjoyment of his possessions". "Until they show government ID" isn't in there!

Perhaps I'm jumping the gun to assume this will be used as a precedent to require on-device scanning for illegal content, and further extended from smartphones to desktop PCs. However, I'm not optimistic.