I think opt-in ID is great. Services like Discord can require ID because they are private services*. Furthermore, I think that in the future, a majority of people will stay on services with some form of verification, because the anonymous internet is noisy and scary.
The underlying internet should remain anonymous. People should remain able to communicate anonymously with consenting parties, send private DMs and create private group chats, and create their own service with their own form of identity verification.
* All big services are unlikely to require ID without laws, because any that does not will get refugees, or if all big services collaborate, a new service will get all refugees.
Age verification is very hard, because parents will give their children their unlocked account, and children will steal their parents' unlocked account. If that's criminalized (like alcohol), it will happen too often to prosecute (much more frequently than alcohol, which is rarely prosecuted anyways). I don't see a solution that isn't a fundamental culture shift.
If there's a fundamental culture shift, there's an easy way to prevent children from using the internet:
- Don't give them an unlocked device until they're adults
- "Locked" devices and accounts have a whitelist of data and websites verified by some organization to be age-appropriate (this may include sites that allow uploads and even subdomains, as long as they're checked on upload)
The only legal change necessary is to prevent selling unlocked devices without ID. Parents would take their devices from children and form locked software and whitelisting organizations.
It's my job as a parent (and I have several kids...) to monitor the things they consume and talk with them about it.
I don't want some blanket ban on content unless it's "age appropriate", because I don't approve that content being banned. (honestly - the idea of "age appropriate" is insulting in the first place)
Fuck man, I can even legally give my kids alcohol - I don't see why it's appropriate to enforce what content I allow them to see.
And I have absolutely all of the same tools you just discussed today. I can lock devices down just fine.
Age verification is a scam to increase corporate/governmental control. Period.
You should be able to choose what's age-appropriate for your kids. Giving them access to e.g. "PG-13" media when they're 9 isn't the problem. Giving mature kids unrestricted access isn't a problem. The problem is culture:
- Many parents don't think about restricting their kids' online exposure at all. And I think a larger issue than NSFW is the amount of time kids are spending: 5 hours according to this survey from 2 years ago https://www.apa.org/monitor/2024/04/teen-social-use-mental-h.... Educating parents may be all that is needed to fix this, since most parents care about their kids and restrict them in other ways like junk food
I don't think they will, and this is because there's an inherent conflict of interest from these large tech companies about actually protecting my kids.
To be blunt: They don't give a fuck, they make money. They will pick money over kids EVERY time.
My current answer is that absolutely none of my children are allowed anywhere near these devices. Mandating shitty age verification laws isn't going to somehow make these companies act responsibly... it's just going to drive alternatives that are actually respectful out of business with additional legislative burden, while Google and Apple continue to act irresponsibly and unethically.
Further - it continues to enshrine the idea that parent's aren't responsible for their kids (see your first point)... The parents that are already neglecting this space will point to laws like this and go "look, the government is doing this for me!". Which is exactly wrong, and exactly what these companies want parents to think (again - the alternative, that parents actually engage and realize just how fucking morally bankrupt these bastards are, hurts bottom lines)
If you want change - remove the damn duopoly. Break them up. Force open markets. Force inter-compatibility.
This is not rocket science. This is basic political science we've known about for literally hundreds of years, the only difference is that our government in the US has been fucking useless because of regulatory capture (of which this will worsen) and the perceived national security & economic value of "owning" the tech stack used internationally.
"Security" when used in these contexts has very little to do with protecting you, or me, or our kids. It has a whole lot to do with protecting corporate bottom lines and governmental control.
Part of the issue with phones is that they are already controlled by the Google/Apple duopoly, and hence heavily optimized for constant distraction and addiction. These laws only cement that duopoly and provide fewer means to build more friendly platforms.
While I don't appreciate the implementation of "security" generally involving monopolization, I think it's important to note that you only need age verification for things that are irrelevant to children. In fact the entire point is to exclude children. So a non-Google/Apple device is still perfectly usable for them if (or even specifically because) it cannot pass age verification/attestation. Really the main concern should be use of attestation for banking/government stuff.
Did you mean "mandatory" parental controls? All current systems are optional and as you describe they are frequently ineffective, so not clear why keeping things like they are would be different.
The current systems are not ineffective because they’re optional, they could be more effective and stay optional.
I also don’t mean “mandatory” as in “the software manufacturer must implement parental controls” like the Colorado bill. There only needs to exist one decent operating system, one decent messaging service, etc. with good parental controls; parents can use those technologies and block the others. Although regulators could pressure specific popular platforms like YouTube, and maybe that would be fine, I think it would be better to incentivize and support add-ons or alternatives (e.g. kid-safe YouTube frontend).
> Fuck man, I can even legally give my kids alcohol - I don't see why it's appropriate to enforce what content I allow them to see.
In the USA it depends on the state. Federal guidelines for alcohol law does suggest exemptions for children drinking under the supervision of their parents, but that's not uniformly adopted. 19 states have no such exceptions, and in many of the remaining 31, restaurants may be banned from allowing alcohol consumption by minors even when their parents are there.
You're assuming that this person is in the US. Alcohol is treated far more liberally in other places. For example, in some places it is legal for restaurants to serve alcohol to minors who are accompanied by a parent...
Another thing: I fundamentally disagree with certain age rarings for kids content. Some explicit violence is rated OK for young audiences, but insert a swear word or a some skin and the age rating is bumped up? This rating system is nonhelp at all. I have to review each bit of content anyway before I can be certain.
> I don't want some blanket ban on content unless it's "age appropriate"
I'm currently struggling with FitBit. Since about the start of the year, my kids can no longer sync their watches to their phones. The "solution" is to completely disable all parental controls on their Google accounts.
I was going to recommend the Gadgetbridge app, but it seems to have little or no support for Fitbit. I does support hundreds of devices, though. I used it extensively with a Mi Band 3, but have yet to try it with my Garmin.
Your kids can’t buy alcohol though. If you want to unlock your phone and let your kids read smut then more power to you. Age gates do not and never will stop that. But I sure as hell don’t want companies selling porn to 5 yr olds.
> Age verification is very hard, because parents will give their children their unlocked account, and children will steal their parents' unlocked account
More simply: If ID checks are fully anonymous (as many here propose when the topic comes up) then every kid will just have their friends’ older sibling ID verify their account one afternoon. Or they’ll steal their parents’ ID when they’re not looking.
Discussions about kids and technology on HN are very weird to me these days because so many commenters have seemingly forgotten what it’s like to be a kid with technology. Before this current wave of ID check discussions it was common to proudly share stories of evading content controls or restrictions as a kid. Yet once the ID check topic comes up we’re supposed to imagine kids will just give up and go with the law? Yeah right.
Circumventing controls as a kid is what taught me enough about computers to get the job that made college affordable (in those days you could just boot windows to a livecd Linux distro and have your way with the filesystem, first you feel like a hacker, later the adults are paying you to recover data).
If we must have controls, I hope the process of circumventing them continues to teach skills that are useful for other things.
The older sibling should be old enough to know better. Or if they're still a kid, they can have their privileges temporarily revoked.
This problem probably can't be solved entirely technologically, but technology can definitely be a part of solving it. I'm sure it's possible to make parental controls that most kids can't bypass, because companies can make DRM that most adults can't bypass.
> The older sibling should be old enough to know better.
This is exactly what I meant by my above comment: It’s like the pro-ID check commenters have become completely disconnected from how young people work.
Someone’s 18 year old sibling isn’t going to be stopped by “should know better”. They probably disagree with the law on principal and think it’s dumb, so they’re just helping out.
But imagine if a locked device was treated like alcohol. Most kids get access to alcohol at some point despite it being illegal, often from older siblings, and rarely with legal consequences for the adult. But it's much less of an issue, because most kids don't get it consistently. Furthermore, "good" kids understand that it's bad, and even some "bad" kids understand that they must limit themselves.
Is it though? When older sibling helps younger sibling with "accessing Steam", or something reasonable like that, even the most sensible and thoughtful older sibling won't be interested in "culture shifts" that block gaming fun.
The alcohol and seatbelt analogies try to elevate equivalence, but miss the mark by a lot. Even one drop of alcohol is obviously not suitable for underage. No seatbelt increases risk no matter your age. "Social media" exposure for the young person is often completely fine and full of "young person" content and activity.
>Or if they're still a kid, they can have their privileges temporarily revoked.
Since people are already talking about using the law instead of parenting this needs clarification. Are the parents the one that would revoke their privileges or the government?
The parents. They're the ones who configure the parental controls. e.g. if their 15-year old gets caught sharing his device with their 7-year old, they can temporarily give him 7-year old permissions as punishment.
> If ID checks are fully anonymous (as many here propose when the topic comes up) then every kid will just have their friends’ older sibling ID verify their account one afternoon.
Exactly the same way that kids used in former days to get cigarettes or alcohol: simply ask a friend or a sibling.
By the way: the owners of the "well-known" beverage shops made their own rules, which were in some sense more strict, but in other ways less strict than the laws:
For example some small shop in Germany sold beverages with little alcohol to basically everybody who did not look suspicious, but was insanely strict on selling cigarettes: even if the buyer was sufficiently old (which was in doubt strictly checked), the owner made serious attempts to refuse selling cigarettes if he had the slightest suspicion that the cigarettes were actually bought for some younger person. In other words: if you attempted to buy cigarettes, you were treated like a suspect if the owner knew that you had younger friends (and the owner knew this very well).
More simply: If ID checks are fully anonymous (as many here propose when the topic comes up) then every kid will just have their friends’ older sibling ID verify their account one afternoon. Or they’ll steal their parents’ ID when they’re not looking.
Digital ID with binary assertion in the device is an API call that Apple's app store curation can ensure is called on app launch or switch. Just checking on launch or focus resolves that problem. It's no longer the account being verified per se, it's the account and the use.
Completely agree. The internet works differently than how people want it to, and filtering services are notoriously easy to bypass. Even if these age-verification laws passed with resounding scope and support, what would stop anyone from merely hosting porn in Romania or some country that didn't care about US age-verification laws. The leads to run down would be legion. I think you could seriously degrade the porn industry (which I wouldn't necessarily mind) but it would be more or less impossible to prevent unauthorized internet users from accessing pornography. And of course that's the say nothing of the blast radius that would come with age-verification becoming entrenched on the internet.
> what would stop anyone from merely hosting porn in Romania or some country that didn't care about US age-verification laws
A government could implement the equivalent of China's great firewall. Even if it doesn't stop everyone, it would stop most people. The main problem I suspect is that it would be widely unpopular in the US or Europe, because (especially younger) people have become addicted to porn and brainrot, and these governments are still democracies.
That isn’t necessary because porn companies don’t exist to gift orgasms, but to make money. They need US citizens to pay them for premium content and subscriptions, and that dependency means they’ll have to comply with US laws.
The words of someone who does not actually look at pornography. The vast majority of pornography-by-consumption is free / ad-supported. Customers are not "paying" and those ads are usually the bottom of the barrel with regard to sleaziness or legality.
Plenty of porn exists for free, posted online by models or digital artists. It's archived in places that circumvent copyright, don't require payment or accounts, and are easily accessible.
pornography is not a profitable industry. even famous participants like 'mia khalifa' only made GBP9.5k (USD 12.8k) lifetime earnings. The average onlyfans has about 21 fans, with an average subscription price of $7.20.
the future of the industry is probably ai slop, personalised ai, and so on
one of the purposes of the porn industry in 00s was money laundering: cash only, large stores with no CCTV, very sparse records, not possible to objectively value why a dvd was being sold for $85
> A government could implement the equivalent of China's great firewall. Even if it doesn't stop everyone, it would stop most people.
Porn is not just political information about human right abuses, government overreach or heavily censored overview of concentration camps for "group X". People can live just fine with government censorship buying into any kind of propaganda.
Kids would find a way to access porn though. Whatever it VPNs, tor or USB stick black market. Government cant even win war on drugs and you expect them to successfully ban porn. What a joke.
It's as easy as parents keeping the default router password, a kid logging in and then setting up port forwarding to a device on a port that they're running a server on, tied to their current residential ip, and then pinging their friends that ip and allowing them all to connect and download whatever files or upload whatever files. The peer-to-peer network could really start establishing itself in ephemeral and very hard to track ways. All you need is one kid with access to a vpn to torrent without copyright concerns to seed the network. Or one kid to get its parents to buy a domain and use that as an anchor so that the dns to ip is set behind the scenes for the peers.
eh... they are more like `dumbocracies` with these measures. None of this is to protect children. Except to satisfy rabid parents who think the world needs to serve them.
Just a personal anecdote from my life - I have set up Youtube account for my kid with correct age restrictions (he is 11). Also this account is under family plan so there are no ads.
My kid logs out of this account so he can watch restricted content. I wonder - what is PG rating for logged out experience?
The only needed culture shift is everyone should realize that it's ultimately the parents/teachers' duty to educate the kids.
If parents think it's okay for their kids to use Facebook/X/whatever somehow responsibly, they should not be punished or prosecuted for that. Yes, I do believe it applies to alcohol too.
It's how it works in physical world. We let the parents to decide whether hiking/swimming/football/walking to the school are too dangerous for their kids. We let the parents to decide which books are suitable for their kids. But somehow when it comes to the internet it's the government's job. I can't help but think there is an astroturf movement manufacturing the consent rn.
You mean this culture shift is needed for the masses but I don't think that's the case. In my widest social circle I am not aware of anyone giving alcohol to young kids (yes by the time they are 16ish yes but even that's rare). Most guardians would willingly do similar with locked devices.
The real problem is that the governments/companies won't get to spy on you if locked devices are given to children only. They want to spy on us all. That's the missing cultural shift.
> Most guardians would willingly do similar with locked devices.
Considering the echo chamber in which I was at school, my friends would have simply used some Raspberry Pi (or a similar device) to circumvent any restriction the parents imposed on the "normal" devices.
Oh yes: in my generation pupils
- were very knowledgeable in technology (much more than their parents and teachers) - at least the nerds who were actually interested in computers (if they hadn't been knowledgeable, they wouldn't have been capable of running DOS games),
- had a lot of time (no internet means lots of time and being very bored),
- were willing to invest this time into finding ways to circumvent technological restrictions imposed upon them (e.g. in the school network).
The kids in your social circle are used to not having access to alcohol, but they're not used to not having access to social media.
Hypothetically, if every kid in your social circle had their device "locked", the adults would probably have a very hard time the kids away from their devices, or just relent, because the kids would be very unhappy. Although maybe with today's knowledge, most people will naturally restrict new kids who've never had unrestricted access, causing a slow culture shift.
And we need a standard where websites can self-rate their own content. Then locked devices can just block all content that isn't rated "G" or whatever.
I imagine there would be a set of filters, including some on by default that most adults keep for themselves. For example, most people don't want to see gore. More would be OK with sexual content, even more would be OK with swear words, ...
Wrong incentive. If you don’t give a shit about exposing children to snuff or porn, but do give a shit about page views and ad revenue, you obviously don’t rate your content or rate it as G to increase that revenue.
The whitelist would be decided by the market: the parents have the unlocked device, there are multiple solutions to lock it and they choose one. Which means that in theory, the dominant whitelist would be one that most parents agree is effective and reasonable; but seeing today's dominant products and vendor lock-in...
I mean look, there's a point where the manufacturers back off and entrust the parents.
Any parent can be reckless and give their children all kinds of things - poison, weapons, pornographic magazines ... at some point the device has enough protective features and it is the parents responsibility.
Digital media use is easier to conceal than weapons. My parents did not protect me from it growing up because they were not responsible, and I was harmed as a result. To this day they still do not realize I was harmed, because I did not tell them and we are not on speaking terms. Trying to be honest would have resulted in further rejection from them. This was on a personality level and I had no way to deal with this as a developing human.
I could not control how my parents were going to raise me, I was only able to play with the hand I was dealt. I hate the idea that parents are sacrosanct and do not share blame in these situations. At the same time, if this is just the family situation you're given and you're handed a device unaware of the implications, who is going to protect you from yourself and others online if your parents won't? Should anyone?
>parents will give their children their unlocked account, and children will steal their parents' unlocked account.
I think either is better than the staus quo. In the first case the parent is waiving away the protections, and in the second the kid is.
Even if a kid buys alcohol, I think it's healthier that they do it by breaking rules and faking ids and knowing that they are doing something wrong, than just doing it and having no way to know it's wrong (except a popup that we have been trained by UX to close without reading (fuck cookie legislation))
That would be the status quo if we had better parental controls.
Trying to enforce parental controls via regulation may only be as effective as Europe enforcing the DMA against Apple. But maybe not, because there's a huge market; if Apple XOR Android does it, they'll gain market share. Or governments can try incentive instead of regulation (or both) and fund a phone with better parental controls. Europe wants to launch their own phone; such a feature would make it stand out even among Americans.
Prove of adulthood should be provided by the bank after logging into a bank account. I'm sure parents just would let their bank details be stolen and such.
Of course no personal details should be provided to the site that requests age confirmation. Just "barer of this token" is an adult.
The "Bank identity" system in Czech Republic (and likely other countries) can be used to log into to various government services. The idea is that you already authenticated to the bank when getting the account, so they can be sure it is really sou when you log in - so why not make it possible for you to log in to other services as well if you want to ?
So we trust a bank more than the government that they won’t extend this to earn more money by disclosing more information? Bad idea. You need a neutral broker.
Just remove "parent" and "account" from the mix and all these. Tie the screen to the human and most of these challenges go away. This is what is trying to be achieved with these laws, so we may as well institute it that way.
I actually don't hate this??? As long as parents can set up their own whitelists and it's not up to the government to have the final say on any particular block.
The problem of "kids accessing the Internet" is a purposeful distraction from the intent of these laws, which is population-level surveillance and Verified Ad Impressions.
Today, in practice it's not a choice, because even the most attentive parents fail to block internet access. Parental controls are ineffective, and all the kid's friends have access so they become alienated. https://beasthacker.com/til/parental-controls-arent-for-pare...
But laws alone won't fix this, and laws aren't necessary (except maybe a law that prevents kids from buying phones). In the article, the child's devices had parental controls, but they were ineffective. There's demand for a phone with better parental controls, so it will come, and more parents are denying access, so their kids will become less alienated.
That is actually a very good solution that is respecting privacy. And is much more effective than asking everyone for ID when opening a website or app.
How does this solve the problem at all? You're just making more problems. Now you have to deal with a black market of "unlocked" phones. You're having to deal with kids sharing unlocked phone. Would police have to wal around trying to buy unlocked phones to catch people selling them to minors? What about selling phones on the internet, would they check ID now?
SOME parents give their children access to their ID. That is NOT the same as ALL parents, and therefore is not a reason not to give those parents a helping hand.
Even just informing children that they're entering an adult space has some value, and if they then have to go ask their parents to borrow their wallet, that's good enough for me.
It would not be solved without a culture shift. But with a culture shift, giving a kid an unlocked device would be as rare as giving them drugs.
I'm sure it will occasionally happen. But kids are terrible at keeping secrets, so they will only have the unlocked device for temporary periods, and I believe infrequent use of the modern internet is much, much less damaging than the constant use we see problems from today. A rough analogy, comparing social media to alcohol: it's as if today kids are suffering from chronic alcoholism, and in the future, kids occasionally get ahold of a six pack.
Doesn't the proposal as it's being implemented in the EU solve the problem under the exact same argumentation? Why are you dismissing a one proposal to then make your own that has exactly the same probable challenges?
Definitively we should have constant verification of the current user with Face ID or similar tech. Every 5 minutes of usage, your camera is activated to check who’s using your phone and validates it. So much secure and safe. /s
This is Nirvana/Perfect Solution fallacy. That's like saying limiting smoking to 18 y/o was futile because teenagers could always have some other adult buy them cigs, or use fake IDs.
Well, age verification is the "we have to do something about this nebulous problem even if the best thing we can think of actually makes everything worse for everyone but it makes us feel better" fallacy, which is equally ridiculous.
No, it's not the same. There are anonymous solutions that solve this problem that are perfectly acceptable. Not perfect for prevention, but a good compromise nonetheless. Like cig/alcohol underage consumption prevention.
I think we totally disagree on the degree of how much this is actually a problem compared to how much we're willing to invest in it. Those anonymous solutions are fairly idealistic and Nirvana-esque themselves, I don't think they'd see wide adoption. Beyond that I'm firmly in the camp that age verification for the kids is a complete smokescreen for the actual intent of these efforts, which is more surveillance, so on principal I'm opposed to any movement in this direction and doubt we'll find common ground.
Yeah, sure, no matter the studies, no matter the developmental indices, ni matter the WHO, no matter the psychologists. Let's also talk about climate change and how it's up for debate?
We don't disagree on whether it is actually a problem, you just have your opinion about facts.
We are arguing different things. I have never stated "psychological effects of the Internet aren't real and therefore this discussion is moot." My argument is "psychological effects or not (and personally I think they are overplayed), the privacy tradeoff of trying to fix them is not worth it (and I doubt any vague gestures in the direction of age assurance would help)." You are focusing on the first parenthetical but the important part is outside it.
We also have no way to actually measure this even if we wanted to do an experiment. So comparing this very soft science to climate change is a bit out of pocket.
> We also have no way to actually measure this even if we wanted to do an experiment.
Sorry, WHAT? No way to measure it? My god, are we talking about the same thing? Are you sure you haven't missed past 12-24 months of increased reporting on the matter from several different angles, from cognitive skills, anxiety, sexual drive, and so on?
I'm saying that, in today's culture, age-gating the internet is likely to be much less effective than age-gating alcohol or tobacco. Most kids spend an appalling amount of time on social media (think, 5 hours/day*); most kids didn't spend this much time or invest this much of their lives into drugs.
I like to believe that, even with the amount of kids vaping, there aren't nearly as many as kids on social media.
To give perspective: in my high school, there were a few kids who vaped in bathrooms, but the majority (including me) did not; we were told many times that it was unhealthy, and anyone caught vaping would be suspended. Everyone I know (including me) had social media, we were not told it was unhealthy (only to not use it too much, not give out PII, avoid bullying, etc.), and it wasn't even policed in some classrooms.
For the smoking analogy to fit, you'd have to have parents giving their children packs of cigarettes to play with and then being mad at Marlboro they figured out how to smoke them.
Laptops can be useful: they can (and should) be locked down, and there’s lots of digital media that teaches effectively, probably even better than anything on paper.
(EDIT: Actually, probably not better than paper. I remember a study that note-taking by hand produced significantly better scores than typing; moreover, drawing is easier on paper, and some assignments are better drawn. But laptops can still be useful, and some assignments (like coding) are better digital. So ultimately, I think laptops should be incorporated alongside pen-and-paper.)
For 2) I agree with the general idea (“static” websites should never be slow), but the aforementioned digital media includes some that can run on low specs. Worst case, you can give students PDFs of physical assignments (with form elements to put answers); but I’m sure there are some minimal websites with K-5 material.
Laptops are NOT useful for any reason in a school classroom below the 9th grade or so. No, not even for test taking, educational videos, or interactive demos.
Maybe for computer science classes, but even there I'd prefer to use shared desktop computers.
There is a lot of research that shows that the depth of understanding the material directly depends on the amount of effort you put in. Or that actually writing down things by hand increases the amount of recall.
And to add to this, it looks like fine motor skills also directly influence brain development and may improve the IQ. The association of higher IQ with better fine motor skills is now well-established, but it also might work in reverse.
There’s a big difference between “having a tool available” and “using it all the time for everything.”
We are not talking about replacing writing and reading on paper.
I was fortunate that my middle and elementary schools had computers. They weren’t used all day long. We used them to do things like learning typing skills and look up references on library computers. I remember using an old Apple II program (old even back when I was in school) in an applied technology class where we designed a car and tested its performance. Yes, before 9th grade. The whole class was kind of like an introduction to some engineering concepts, which involved a rotation of different stations we would go to where we did some interactive assignments. It was both fun and inspiring, and, dare I say, a computer was involved.
I’m now just remembering that we even learned BASIC programming in 8th grade!
One of my most fond memories of middle school was a mock publishing competition where students wrote essays and stories and pitched them to other groups of students acting as publishers with a budget. I remember using interesting fonts on the titles of my typed out stories to try and stand out and market myself.
Later in high school (admittedly, after the grade 9 cutoff you prescribed, more on that later), we used them in a multimedia class to learn to do basic graphic design as well as writing proper business letters to request permission from magazines to use their covers for a multimedia project. (Of course, with fair use, we didn’t have to ask, but the whole point was to learn to properly contact and communicate with business professionals).
I can’t imagine what it would be like if my school didn’t have the funding to have these tools available to teach what we now know are essential life skills. I probably wouldn’t have ended up making well above median income in the technology industry.
I think your 9th grade cutoff is particularly silly. You can start subjects like algebra before high school. You really think there are kids doing formal classes like programming and digital design/art before high school? Go look into some of the curriculum course list for some of the top middle and high schools in the country.
> There’s a big difference between “having a tool available” and “using it all the time for everything.”
Not really, when the tool ends up just pushing everything out.
> We are not talking about replacing writing and reading on paper.
Yet this is EXACTLY what has already happened. A lot of laptop kids literally can't write. Not even in block letters.
> I was fortunate that my middle and elementary schools had computers.
That's the thing. You had computers for CS classes. I had a somewhat similar experience, starting with ZX-Spectrum. I think this is actually great, especially if you start with something basic like Apple II.
But you did not have them on your desk at all times. You had to learn math and language by actually writing things in a physical notebook with a pen.
> I think your 9th grade cutoff is particularly silly. You can start subjects like algebra before high school.
Why the heck do you need computers for algebra?!? School-level algebra is something that is literally better done without any calculating tools.
> You really think there are kids doing formal classes like programming and digital design/art before high school? Go look into some of the curriculum course list for some of the top middle and high schools in the country.
Formal classes with desktop computers that STAY IN CLASS after the lesson are fine. Having access to a computer _after_ school is also fine.
I’m not sure why you’re assuming I meant “computers at desks with unfettered access at all times.” Computers being portable doesn’t mean unfettered access. That wasn’t how my school’s laptop carts worked.
I also never said to use computers for algebra, I brought that up to point out that middle school curriculum is quite advanced because you thought that kids below grade 9 shouldn’t use them at all. But there are middle schoolers using computing devices to make digital art, deliver multimedia presentations, edit videos, and program robots. The prescriptiveness dictating computers are just for computer class is incredibly outdated.
I suggest you spend a little more time reading my comment to understand the underlying meaning a little more.
I think them being locked down is a big part of their agitation. But we live in a sue first society so the school has no choice but to lock them down. It's not like the 90's when I was in school. We were allowed free reign to tinker with the machines.
Would you also accept a city providing benefits to only white residents?
You could provide benefits on a criteria like poverty, which is intrinsically race-blind and agreeable but happens to include a higher ratio of black people. Like you could provide a scholarship based on test scores, which is intrinsically race-blind but happens to include more Asians. But this is objectively racist, and I believe unlikely to benefit even black people in the long run due to the underlying message.
How do you ensure the tampered content isn’t re-hashed? Usually if you’re saving the hash in advance, you can save the whole archived page. Otherwise, you can use a regular archive service then hash the archived page yourself.
The only way I know to ensure an archive isn’t tampered is to re-archive it. If you sent a site to archive.today, archive.org, megalodon.jp, and ghostarchive.org, it’s unlikely that all will be tampered in the same way.
A list of hashes (tuple of [hashed url+date metadata, hashed content]) takes much less disk space than the archive contents themselves. Archive websites could publish the list for all their content so it can be compared against in the future. People would save copies of the list. If you didn't store the list yourself ahead of time, and don't trust a third-party to be "the source of truth", the archive could've uploaded the hashes to the blockchain at archive time:
It blocks the dot (LED indicator). That should be in the title.
I thought this was impossible via hardware? Except the screenshots show iPhones with the "dynamic island", where the dot is on main display, not a separate LED. That's an issue for security-conscious people...
The archive.today owner made a good suggestion: Wikipedia should make their own archive. They can migrate all archive.xx snapshots there. They have the resources and it would be as resilient as Wikipedia itself.
Since Wikipedia established that the archiver tampered with stored pages I doubt migrating is on the cards, the trust in those archives has been burned regardless of who hosts them going forward.
AFAIK the only evidence of tampered pages are those involved in this controversy. That archive.xx could tamper pages has always been possible (and a reason why Wikipedia should have their own archive, and migrate ASAP).
But still, Wikipedia can corroborate any archive.xx page, and if they find a matching source, archive that instead.
I imagine micropayments for small sites to avoid DoS (e.g. from dumb AI scrapers) and maybe get decent profit if they become very popular, but mainly pay to keep the server running. They would be so small that someone who spends their entire day visiting different websites would pay less than their phone bill; and centralized scrapers with a decent amount of funding would still work.
Real funding would come in ways that don't depend on visitor count: patronage, government/industry grants, people running the sites having side jobs, UBI. Because:
- I'd rather avoid intellectual property and allow AI summaries, remixes, etc. without penalty to the main site
- Visitor count tends to benefit mainstream sites. Patronage and grants can support niche sites who expect few users that are willing to pay more, without gating mainstream visitors (via higher visitor micropayments) in case they become popular
- Visitor count benefits sites that have already been built. Patronage and grants support sites that look promising, but haven't been built and may fail. The latter include indie and experimental sites; the former only include sites that are easy to build, and sites whose success is predictable from people that already have money
- I'm skeptical that revenue from visitor count (even from ads or subscriptions) will remain sustainable long-term
The above doesn't only apply to traditional sites, but any digital product including ones people currently pay for, like books, movies, and video games. These creators need to make a living, but since their product is not physical, there is no need to tie revenue to copies sold, and I suspect tying revenue to patronage and grants would lead to better products.
In real life, can you choose an experiment perfectly randomly?
You can ask many people to propose hypotheses and choose one at random, and perhaps with a good sample you get better experiments. You can query a Markov chain until it produces an interpret-able hypothesis. But the people or Markov chain (because English itself) has significant bias.
Also, some experiments have wider-reaching implications than others (this is probably more relevant for the Markov chain, because I expect the hypotheses it forms to be like "frogs can learn to skate").
The underlying internet should remain anonymous. People should remain able to communicate anonymously with consenting parties, send private DMs and create private group chats, and create their own service with their own form of identity verification.
* All big services are unlikely to require ID without laws, because any that does not will get refugees, or if all big services collaborate, a new service will get all refugees.
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