It doesn't guarantee any security, but it is necessary for you to be able to to be able to have confidence in the security in a reasonable time frame. And if you need a guarantee that the source matches the binary, then you can build it yourself.
Our results suggest that these efforts offer limited value.
First, we find no significant relationship between whether users have recently completed cybersecurity awareness training and their likelihood of failing a phishing simulation.
Second, when evaluating recipients of embedded phishing training, we find that the absolute difference in failure rates between trained and untrained users is extremely low across a variety of training content.
Third, we observe that most users spend minimal time interacting with embedded phishing training material in-the-wild; and that for specific types of training content, users who receive and complete more instances of the training can have an increased likelihood of failing subsequent phishing simulations.
Taken together, our results suggest that anti-phishing training programs, in their current and commonly deployed forms, are unlikely to offer significant practical value in reducing phishing risks.
I've long been of the view that most of the "phishing training" that gets sold to companies is largely snake oil with very little benefit, and is essentially a compliance-driven waste of money. It's nice to see a study supporting this view.
They don't need to make anything - that capability has been there for years. It was mostly used to block sites with IIoC, but they also blocked access to various piracy related sites and things like that.
Those petitions aren't really worth anything - governments have ignored ones with over six million signatures before.
And they also ignored this one a few years back that had just under 700,000 signatures to "make verified ID a requirement for opening a social media account":
Ironically, the primary reason they gave for rejecting it was:
> However, restricting all users’ right to anonymity, by introducing compulsory user verification for social media, could disproportionately impact users who rely on anonymity to protect their identity. These users include young people exploring their gender or sexual identity, whistleblowers, journalists’ sources and victims of abuse. Introducing a new legal requirement, whereby only verified users can access social media, would force these users to disclose their identity and increase a risk of harm to their personal safety.
The other point is that recent polls suggest the British public are overwhelmingly in support of this legislation [0], which is not reflected in most of the narrative we see online. Whether they support how it has been implemented is a different matter, but the desire to do something is clear.
It's sadly an example of terrible leading question bias, to the point where I'm surprised that it even got a 22% oppose rate.
The percentages would change dramatically were one to write it as, "From everything you have seen and heard, do you support or oppose the recent rules requiring adults to upload their id or a face photo before accessing any website that allows user to user interaction?"
Both questions are factually accurate, but omit crucial aspects.
I live in a country where 91.78% of the population voted for a referendum that bought back hard labour in prisons.
As one of the few who voted against it I have yet to encounter a single person who voted for it who both supports hard labour and realised that was in the question being asked.
Why do you claim the 1999 referendum reintroduced hard labor in NZ prisons? I've never seen anything to that effect. The reforms were related to bail, victims rights and parole.
"Should there be a reform of our justice system placing greater emphasis on the needs of victims, providing restitution and compensation for them and imposing minimum sentences and hard labour for all serious violent offenses?"
Now let's play tldr with the law!
Luckily it was non binding and stands forever as an argument against binding referendums.
I'm not really seeing the deception here since it specifies hard labour and says it would apply to all serious violent offenses. How could you vote for this and not know you were voting for hard labour?
"Should there be a reform of our justice system" -> "should the law be passed"
"emphasis", "restitution", "compensation" -> too hard to skim, brain is bailing out
---
the only way to provide valid direct democracy is to provide more than enough explanations and rewordings from both sides of the debate *at the point of voting* to remove miscommunication
The deception is that it combines two largely unrelated questions into one vote - leading with one that most will agree and followed by one that is more questionable. By the time people will be reading the second question they will already have be primed with an opinion on the first.
In many respects I agree with you there, I almost went with softer language. The fact remains that it appears people were deceived. All of the advocacy pushing the referendum only focused on the first part. To this day I find people who are amazed that it mentioned hard labour and and that they voted for it.
[edit]
I guess think of it in terms of a vote that you had discussed and decided upon before you voted. Could you honestly say that you would read every word of the question or would you just look at the start of it to establish that it was the question under discussion and then trust that the discussion accurately represented what the question on the form would say. The length of the question, was I believe specifically designed to be long to prevent the frequency of its full publication.
Could you honestly say that you would read every word of the question
Yes?? It's not like a school exam where the questions are secret until you see it in the voting booth, and even if it were, you should still read the question carefully. I'm all for things being written as clearly as possible but at some point you have to acknowledge that voters have a responsibility to think about what they're voting for.
It is consistent with my experience that most people seem to not realise that they voted for hard labour.
That is indeed the entire theme of this thread, That people can give an answer to a question that in some way does not reflect their honestly held opinion.
> most people seem to not realise that they voted for hard labour
This is incredibly anecdotal, a major victim of selection bias, and also there are possibly effects of agreeableness here b/c it seems like you may be part of a vocal minority on this issue (and I mean that with absolutely no negative connotations). That said, I don't automatically reject vibes based determinations like this because often the high bandwidth of personal interaction can outweigh the problems with low bandwidth questioning in polls. But in this case, when 90% voted in favor, I have a hard time believing it. I think that what you can safely conclude from your experience is that a lot of people didn't know what they were voting for. If you wanted to say maybe it was really 75-25 I could go with that, but 91% in favor (in an actual vote and not a poll) is pretty convincing to me.
Eh, it’s kind of the opposite for me. I’ve never seen any legitimate vote in a democracy > 90%. Even if you put ‘we agree that puppies are cute and fluffy and deserve all the pets’, > 10% will vote the other way purely out contrarian ness. Or because they’re cat people. Or because fuck you, that’s why.
And there is no way you can convince me 91% of New Zealand voters, where this is the common policy stance [https://www.mbie.govt.nz/business-and-employment/employment-...], had any clue they were voting for forced hard labor for prisoners. Especially considering how relatively cushy the current standards are for prisoners.
I’m sure with enough lawyers and PR folks could also write (and pass) a CA popular thingy which calls for all males to be kicked in the groin too.
That said, I’m also a big believer in voters getting what they voted for - only way they’ll learn. Besides, a few kicks to the groin might teach them a lesson!
Modern slavery legislation passed in 2022 has abslutely no bearing on public opinion on crime and punishment for violent offenders in 1999. People in NZ have been fed up with soft on crime policies and short setences for violent repeat offenders for a long, long, long time (and continue to be today). Despite what the noisy left wing in this country might tell you.
It baffles me that you people think we didn't know what we voted for in a referendum question expressed in a single sentence which included the words,
> Should there be a reform of our justice system [...] imposing minimum sentences and hard labour for all serious violent offences?
idk, maybe they're actually in favor of hard labour (which was after all spelled out in the question) and they're just telling you what they think you want to hear so you don't bug them about it. A lot of people are happy to lie this way.
I don't buy that, and even if they did that doesn't make it deceptive. I'm not arguing in favor of this increased punishment, it just seems to me that its stated plainly enough you can't seriously argue that people were tricked.
It is somewhat deceptive, or at least misleading, to bundle up the concepts of giving the victims compensation, and punishing the prisoners more aggressively.
Unless the prison labor is providing the compensation, but that would be totally bizarre and dystopian, haha. Not really the sort of thing you’d see in a civilized country.
"Hard labour for all serious violent offenses" seems almost refreshingly straightforward. Was there more in the actual referendum that was hidden? I grant that "serious violent offenses" is somewhat vague; was it overly broad?
That question clearly says hard labour. I'm sure some people didn't read it, but I think there also may be another effect there, where when talking to people in person, they realize you are morally opposed to forced hard labour, and don't want to seem like a bad person, so they pretend they didn't know. Sort of similar to the recent effect in the US where trump significantly underpolled as many voted for him but don't want to admit it.
Yeah. It's the "foot in the door technique." The same is being done with Chat Control.
It's very difficult to oppose a law ostensibly designed to fight CSAM. But once the law passes, it'll be easily expanded to other things like scanning messages to prevent terrorism.
See also:
> Concern over mass migration is terrorist ideology, says Prevent
The problem is that one of the most secure places in the world is a maximum security prison. Hence many measures that drag us closer to the prison state do genuinely improve security.
It takes some balls for the society to say: No, we don't agree to yield an essential liberty in exchange to actual real increase of security. Yes, we accept that sometimes bad people will do evil things, because the only way to prevent that would inflict even more damage on everyone. Yes, we are willing to risk harm to stay free.
There is always plenty of people who are ready to buy more comfort in exchange for limitations of liberty that, as they think, will not affect them, because they are honest, got nothing to hide, always follow the majority... until it does affect them, but it's too late.
> It's very difficult to oppose a law ostensibly designed to fight CSAM. But once the law passes, it'll be easily expanded to other things like scanning messages to prevent terrorism.
Oh, look, you did it in literally two sentences. It turns out it's pretty easy to to oppose such law. Only there's simply no need to do it when you're the main beneficiary.
People constantly cite this poll as it is proof that British people want this.
You cannot trust the YouGov polling. It is flawed.
> Despite the sophisticated methodology, the main drawback faced by YouGov, Ashcroft, and other UK pollsters is their recruitment strategy: pollsters generally recruit potential respondents via self-selected internet panels. The American Association of Public Opinion Research cautions that pollsters should avoid gathering panels like this because they can be unrepresentative of the electorate as a whole. The British Polling Council’s inquiry into the industry’s 2015 failings raised similar concerns. Trying to deal with these sample biases is one of the motivations behind YouGov and Ashcroft’s adoption of the modelling strategies discussed above.
Even if the aforementioned problems didn't exist with the polling. It has been known for quite a while that how you ask a question changes the results. The question you linked was the following.
> From everything you have seen and heard, do you support or oppose the recent rules requiring age verification to access websites that may contain pornographic material?
Most people would think "age verification to view pornography". They won't think about all the other things that maybe caught in that net.
All polling has problems like this, but YouGov has the same methodology for everything and usually gets within a margin of error of +-8. Even if they have an especially bad sample, the UK probably really does support the law.
Think about how many people are less comfortable with porn than tech interested males between age 18 and 40.
> All polling has problems like this, but YouGov has the same methodology for everything and usually gets within a margin of error of +-8.
The way the very question was asked is a problem in itself. It is flawed and will lead to particular result.
> if they have an especially bad sample, the UK probably really does support the law
The issue is that the public often doesn't understand the scope of the law. Those that do are almost always opposed to it.
> Think about how many people are less comfortable with porn than tech interested males between age 18 and 40.
It isn't about the pornography. This is why conversations about this are frustrating.
I am worried about the surveillance aspect of it. I go online because I am pseudo-anonymous and I can speak more frankly to people about things that I care about to people who share similar concerns.
I don't like how the law came into place, the scope of the law, the privacy concerns and what the law does in practice.
Even if you don't buy any of that. There is a whole slew of other issues with it. Especially identity theft.
Out of curiosity, what makes you say that the majority of HN loves porn? I've seen a few random references to it but nothing that would indicate that HN loves porn any more than any other community loves porn.
> I have good reasons to be suspicious of polling organisations such as YouGov
You have secret reasons to suspect all polling?
If that is the case, and where suspicious means automatically rejecting anything that doesn’t agree with your vibes, then yes, that is a deep and flawed bias and statistical illiteracy.
> If that is the case, and where suspicious means automatically rejecting anything that doesn’t agree with your vibes, then yes, that is a deep and flawed bias and statistical illiteracy.
What if you're suspicious of all polling regardless of whether it agrees with your preferences or not?
It's well-understood that leading questions and phrasing will get you any response to a poll that you want. That being the case, what good are any of them? They're only telling you something about how the issue was put rather than anything about the true preferences of the population.
> What if you're suspicious of all polling regardless of whether it agrees with your preferences or not?
I’d still call that statistical illiteracy. Polling, as a cohort, contains information. It’s dispersed across polls and concentrated among quality pollsters.
It’s never definitive. But someone concluding that all polling is useless because the statistics are hard is sort of analogous to someone rejecting cosmology because we haven’t actually been to Andromeda.
> what good are any of them?
If I want to know, today, who will be in power tomorrow and what policies they could pass that would be popular, polling is useful. If I want to know what issues I can build a coalition around, and which to abandon because the people most passionate about them cannot bother to vote, polling is helpful.
> rather than anything about the true preferences of the population
They’re telling you how people think when they communicate and act. What is in their heads is unknowable. At the end of the day, I care how they will vote (and if they will vote) and if they will call (or are even capable of calling) they’re elected if pissed off or enthralled. Everything else is philosophical.
At the end of the day, whether by poll or advert, information is introduced to a population in a biased form because it’s promulgated by biased actors. Knowing which way that bias is trending and resonating is useful.
It am suspicious of polling because I have a decent understanding of statistics. That is the opposite of statistical illiteracy.
> But someone concluding that all polling is useless because the statistics are hard is sort of analogous to someone rejecting cosmology because we haven’t actually been to Andromeda.
That isn't the argument being made. Nobody said it is "useless". I said I was "suspicious of polling organisations". Polling can be and has been used to manipulate public sentiment.
Therefore it is prudent to be suspicious of any polling.
> If I want to know, today, who will be in power tomorrow and what policies they could pass that would be popular, polling is useful. If I want to know what issues I can build a coalition around, and which to abandon because the people most passionate about them cannot bother to vote, polling is helpful.
That's fair in the context of, you're a political operative who is trying to enact specific policies as your occupation and you therefore have the time to go through and carefully inspect numerous polls to derive a well-rounded understanding. But that's also quite disconnected from how polls are typically used in the public discourse.
Ordinary people don't have time to do that, so instead political operatives will commission a poll to get the result they want, or find one from a reputable pollster who unintentionally made a phrasing error in their favor, or just cherry pick like this: https://xkcd.com/882/
And then use the result to try to convince people that the public is actually on their side and it would be ineffective or costly to oppose them. Which, unless you have the time to go carefully read a hundred different polls to see whether the result is legitimate, means that the sensible strategy is to give polls no weight.
Or to put it another way, on any politically contentious issue there will always be at least one poll saying X and another saying not-X, which means that in the absence of a more thorough analysis that exceeds the resource availability of most members of the public (and even many legislators), neither has any information content because the probability of a poll existing with that result was already ~100%.
It isn't about something not agreeing with my vibes. I don't appreciate when people put words in my mouth. I never said all. I obviously meant some.
Firstly in my original post I stated why I don't believe YouGov to be accurate. It isn't just me that has an issue with thier polling.
Secondly, It is well known that many people are swayed by peer pressure and/or what is perceived to be popular. Therefore if you can manipulate polling to show something is popular, then it can sway people that are more influenced by peer pressure/on the fence.
Often in advertising they will site a stat about customer satisfaction. In the small print it will state the sample size or the methodology and it is often hilariously unrepresentative. Obviously they are relying on people not reading the fine print and being statistically illiterate.
Politicians, governments and corporations have been using various tactics throughout the 20th and 21st century to sway public opinion, both home and abroad to their favour.
This issue has divisive for years and has historically had a huge amount of push back. You can see this in the surge of VPN downloads (which is a form of protest against these laws), the popularity of content covering this issue.
The internet has made it much more difficult to censor. It is quite obvious to me that they wish to end online anonymity, which makes it easier for them to target people and thus easier to censor.
I believe that this is the precursor before massive political censorship.
As stated in my first reply on this subject. Even if you don't buy into that there are obvious problems with handing you ID over to third parties. There is no guarantee they can keep your data safe (and often haven't).
They may not be against content restriction, instead they may be against removal of user privacy or anonymity. If the proof of age thing was some kind of zero knowledge proof such that the age verifying group has no knowledge of what you're accessing, and the site you're accessing has no knowledge of you as an individual (beyond tells like IP address etc.) then perhaps they'd be more open to it?
There isn't any technology that can prevent sharing of age verification with third parties without tying your uses to your identity. To unmask someone in order to uncover sharing, you would require the ability to do it in general, which is incompatible with privacy/anonymity.
And yet homomorphic encryption is a thing. It's possible to process the encrypted request and be unable to see it.
Similarly we could easily devise many solutions that can prove the age in the privacy - respecting ways (like inserting the age-confirming token inside the pack of cigarettes which an adult could then purchase with cash, etc)
You're not understanding the dichotomy. It doesn't matter what kind of encryption you use, the system you're asking for can be made much simpler than this: Just use the same token for everyone and only give it to adults. It needs no cryptography at all, it just needs to be a random string that children don't have. You don't need anything to do with cigarettes, just print it on the back of every adult's ID or allow any adult to show their ID at any government office.
But then anyone can post the token on the internet where anyone can get it, the same as they could do with anything cryptographic that you put on the back of cigarettes or whatever. Unless you have a way of tracing it to the person who did it in order to impose penalties, which is precisely the thing that would make it not private/anonymous, which is why they're incompatible.
If you're going to do one then do the first one -- just make it actually untraceable -- but understand that it won't work. It would never work anyway because there are sites outside of your jurisdiction that won't comply with whatever you're proposing regardless, so the thing that fails to work while not impacting privacy is better than the thing that fails to work while causing widespread harm, but then people are going to complain about it and try to impose the thing that does cause widespread harm by removing privacy. Which is why the whole thing should be abandoned instead.
He didn't say the majority of HN loves porn. He said that male demographic likes porn more than any other, and that demographic is the majority of HN. It doesn't logically follow that the majority of HN supports porn.
Fake statistics just to illustrate the difference. Males 18-40 support porn at 60%, which is higher than any other demographic. HN is 60% males 18-40. With these numbers, 36% of HN is males 18-40 who support porn, and if all other demographics on HN oppose it, then those 36% are the minority.
(By the way, I have no idea what the real numbers are, and don't really care. I'm just responding to an evident confusion about what was actually said.)
Statistics doesn't work that way, and if OP wanted to say that, they should have specified that, rather than saying the majority of HN is a demographic that likes porn. It may be true in a statistical sense, but that's not how it is read.
There is a couple of threads of people asking for help with porn addiction, you will find that the responses are in a funny way much like potheads, plenty of denialism.
Also, if you post anything critical of porn; you get downvoted with little exceptions. Try it, if the topic ever comes up, say something critical and your comment gets flagged and removed.
HN has a massive demographic overlap with problematic pornography consumers.
Re downvotes: I suspect there are different forces at play. I would downvote such a post, not because supporting porn is one of my agendas, but opposing puritanism is.
> No evidence for this but in my experience tech people tend to like porn more than others for whatever reason.
This does not jibe with my experience. I think perhaps your experience is not a representative sample of tech people. But mine probably isn't either. So it's pointless for either of us to state an opinion here based on our experience with our own slice of tech people.
It's kinda funny how this is a subthread about how YouGov's polling on the Online Safety Act is flawed, but we're committing the same exact sins ourselves.
In a number of recent polls in English speaking countries young men have been one of the strongest anti-porn demographics actually. I think HN being tech adjacent with the history and practical reality of how the internet works along with being more libertarian (or at least liberal) is going to bias that more than the gender distribution.
I don't put much faith in polls generally, but I put even less faith in polls where people are asked how they feel about porn. I don't think you can come to any reasonable conclusion from data of such low quality as is typical of polling these days.
Even in the absolute best circumstances where enough people are polled to be representative, and those people aren't asked any leading/misleading questions, and the identity of all those people are known, pre-selected without bias, and verified (preventing the same person/group of people voting 50 times or brigading some anonymous internet survey), and all of those people are 100% confident that their answers are private and won't be able to be used against them, you're still left with the fact that people lie. All the time. Especially about anything to do with sex. They also have terrible memories and their beliefs about themselves and their views often don't hold up when their actual behavior is observed. Self-reported data is pretty weak even when sex/shame/morality/fear of punishment don't come into play.
Without really digging into the specifics to try to work out how seriously you can take a given survey's results at all, it's best to just not to treat them seriously.
Sure but IIRC the statistics were relative to previous polls and the conversation was about how people talk about porn on the web not how they actually use it so I think in this case it actually works well.
As always, the devil is in the details. Very careful wording:
>do you support or oppose the recent rules requiring age verification to access websites that may contain pornographic material?
"may" is doing the heavy lifting. Any website that hosts image "may" contain pornograohic content. So they don't associate this with "I need id to watch YouTube" it's "I need ID to watch pornhub". Even though this affects both.
On top of that, the question was focused on peon to begin with. This block was focused more generally on social media. The popular ones of which do not allow pornography.
Rephrase the question to "do you agree with requiring ID submission to access Facebook" and I'd love to see how that impacts responses.
It's funny, I actually interpret it differently; by using "may" vs omitting it would actually imply to include sites like YouTube and Facebook. Without the "may", to me it would imply only sites that have a primary intent of pornographic material, not sites that could include it accidentally.
The moment the Russia Ukraine war hit, the top 10 apps in Russia was half VPNs.
As long as websites don't want to lock out any user without an account, and as long as vpns exist, it'll be hard to enforce any of this. At least for now, that's one line big tech won't let them cross easily.
It isn't a requirement to enforce this. All it does is to ensure that you will be more at risk of breaking the law and that little detail will show that you intended to evade the law so your presumption of innocence gets dinged: apparently you knew that what you were doing was wrong because you used a VPN so [insert minor offense or thought crime here] is now seen in a different light.
Selective enforcement is much more powerful as a tool than outright enforcement, before you know it double digit percentages of the populace are criminals, that might come in handy some day.
Not yet - only for searching extremist and terrorist content, no matter using VPN or not. Oh, almost the same content that is regulated by Online Safety Act in UK.
I had the misfortune of talking with a few potheads, and HN's reaction to porn addiction is the same of potheads, denialism, mental gymnastics, and everything but accepting that porn can actually be problematic.
The only reason it doesn't have it's own DSM classification is a mere question of technicality, whatever it is a separate and distinct kind of addiction, or just a manifestation of other types of hyper-sexual disorder.
Would-be democratic countries should have petitions with actual teeth - that is ones that get enough signatures mean the issue is no longer up to the representatives but will be decided in a referendum.
School bullys, parents, friends, community members, church leaders and many others I imagine. The idea was that it would have your real name and it was verified by your ID.
Yep, I feel like there is a cognitive dissonance somewhere in there. On one thread about social media and internet affecting young people negatively, you have people saying parents should control their kids' exposure to the internet. And in another thread about ID laws, you have people saying kids should have privacy to roam the internet.
Parents have plenty of capacity to exercise control over their children.
For example, how about a law that says websites have to restrict access to pornographic content if the client's user agent sets an HTTP header indicating they don't want to see it? Now you don't have any privacy problems because the header contains no personally identifying information -- you don't even have to be under 18 to opt into it. But then parents can configure the kid's devices to send that header, without even impacting the kid's privacy to view content that isn't designated as pornographic, since the header is an opt-in to censorship rather than the removal of anonymity.
Also notice that an academic discussion of sexual identity isn't inherently pornographic but is something that can require privacy/anonymity.
We are discussing "young people exploring their gender or sexual identity on the internet". This does include pornography, because it's very accessible and not hard to come by if you search for sexual terms. It also includes social media and online games where predators, and again, pornography is present.
Porn peddlers would probably pinky-promise not to disobey the user-agent and expose the kids to the content (and get them while they're young).
However, as we have already seen, asking nicely in the HTTP headers doesn't actually work, it may even help porn peddlers better target children. We also know from recorded interviews with these predetors that they don't seem to actually mind exposing kids to porn.
> Porn peddlers would probably pinky-promise not to disobey the user-agent and expose the kids to the content (and get them while they're young).
We're talking about a law. If you distribute pornography to someone who sent the header in that request, it would be a violation of the law. But that law doesn't have any ID requirements or privacy problems, unlike the proposed one.
> However, as we have already seen, asking nicely in the HTTP headers doesn't actually work, it may even help porn peddlers better target children.
To begin with, "targeting children" is preposterous. It assumes that they would not only not care but prefer to have children as users than adults, even though children are less likely to have access to money to pay for content/subscriptions and purposely targeting children would get them into trouble even under longstanding existing laws.
On top of that, the header isn't specifying that the user is under 18, it's specifying that the user agent is requesting not to be shown pornography. It's as likely to be set when the user is a 45 year old woman as a 14 year old boy, so using it to distinguish between them wouldn't work anyway.
They would benefit from targeting children because porn is addictive and it is a stronger addiction the younger you start. Building future customers, basic business tactics really.
This is the kind of "business tactic" they used to teach about in DARE rather than business school.
Porn companies don't have any kind of monopoly or brand loyalty and the ones shady enough to do something like that are exactly the ones that won't still be in business by the time today's kids are adults, so anyone doing it wouldn't be the one deriving a benefit from it.
Even normal companies don't care about customers decades from now because the thing they do teach in business school is discount rates. A dollar in 10 years is worth less than half that today. Likewise, managers get bonuses and promotions on the basis of present-day profits rather than something that happens a generation from now when they're likely to be at a different company anyway.
The premise that they're expected to do that on a widespread basis is ridiculous. Instead it will be one fool who writes something along those lines in an email which is then published because media companies love publishing anything which is bad PR for someone they don't like, regardless of whether it was ever widely implemented or implemented at all. It isn't an actual business strategy for real businesses.
Decades? Generation? Make a good argument if you are going to make one. We are talking a few years here, say 12, 14, 16 to 18, and they get a steady customer.
The premise of "steady customer" is that they stick with you. Which, to begin with, is implausible because there are so many competing services, and even if it actually happened and that person subscribed to your service until they're 80 years old, those years are decades away.
Companies think both at a micro and macro scale. They chase individuals but they are also very interested in seeing the entire landscape be more interested in whatever they are selling. If porn peddlers were only targeting "that creepy uncle", and not thinking beyond that, the porn industry would not have been as big as it is today. The financial insentive is very real, and so is the desire to keep porn accessible to kids.
The dichotomy you're implying is "that creepy uncle" on one hand and a large proportion of the population on the other, but it's the latter in both cases. The people between the ages of 14 and 80 are nearly the same number of people as the ones between 18 and 80, and the people between 14 and 17 don't have money to pay you during those years anyway.
Targeting them has a lower return than targeting people who are of age.
This is just being intentionally obtuse. Just looking at simple probabilistic thinking, a porn company is more likely to get more customers if they target teenagers, make porn more normalized, obviously make porn legal, etc. If they have these incentives, then these companies would do them. They are not exactly headed by moralists or ethically inclined people..
Specific to targeting teenagers, porn users are mostly under 30, so your statement about 14-18 being around the same as 18-80 is irrelevant. About not being able to pay at 14-17, sure, let's go with that, but they start paying after that. We are talking a few years here. Companies do have incentives to create customers just a few years down the line.
Let me ask a few rhetorical questions. How do you think social media became popular? How did tiktok, snapchat, facebook, instagram become popular? Even yikyak became popular because they targeted teens. Why has so much advertising been targeted to teenagers for decades now? Hell, how did onlyfans become popular? All these companies have massive incentives to target teenagers.
So your stance of these porn companies not targeting teenagers is just being willfully obtuse.
Your argument is bullshit. There is no content filter on this planet that will prevent children from seeing blocked content. The children that know how to circumvent the protections will circumvent them. The providers of blocked content will figure out a way around them too.
Content filters only affect law abiding users and providers. The hallmark of an effective policy is to make it as easy as possible to comply with it. Setting a header is pretty damn easy to implement and enforce by the government. It also displays trust in law abiding citizen, who will comply with the law, because they know that it serves their best interests, rather than being shoved down their throats against their will.
The alternative will have exactly the same or - far more likely - worse results, because the cost of verifying every user's age is far too high to be implemented by the vast majority of sites on the internet. It's more likely that when law abiding citizens are faced with laws that are impossible to implement that they just throw up their hands up and close up shop or move somewhere else.
In the second scenario their services might still be accessible in the UK and need to be blocked by the UK government, the online safety act achieves essentially nothing in this scenario.
I have noticed recently a tendency to refer to teenagers too as 'children', or worse : 'kids'.
This is a dangerous semantic drift that ignores how teenagers are in the process of developing into adults, and so need the parent supervision of them to be slowly relaxed. (Especially since, if handled poorly, they tend to rebel, and cause much more damage.)
And, as a reminder, not all erotic or erotic-adjacent (or other "adult topics") works are porn,
and depending on the jurisdiction the age of consent is often less than 18
(16 in UK, though I am sure there are important details hidden behind this single number),
though I do understand that there might be new, unique challenges here in the Internet era, with laws that might not have caught up yet.
Minors are still humans who deserve rights. They should not be considered property of parents, regardless of fear mongering about grooming. Teenagers should have the right to access information without their parents knowing, as their parents can be just as, if not more dangerous to their health and well being as a hypothetical groomer. Many teens face real abuse from their parents over their sexuality. They should not be forced to live in the shadows or face abuse due to a "protect the kids" narrative.
Minors can have unfettered access to the web once grown up and yes the parents should be able to decide when that is to some point (that point being the 18th birthday). There is really no reason kids need to be able to "explore their sexuality" any earlier than that.
Sexuality is part of the human condition that doesn't start on one's 18th birthday just because over-protective parents want complete control of their child.
It's weird that parents believe they need to control every facet of their child's life, down to being able to learn about why they feel the way they do. It's a form of abuse and coercion.
I'm not sure how online privacy laws (or a lack of them) would spare a child who objected to marrying someone their parents wanted to force her to. Murdering your children is/was already illegal and the parents did that anyway. We can't worry about what the small number of psychopathic parents might do if kids don't have online privacy. We should instead try harder to make sure that kids are protected against their abusive parents regardless of the situation. There should have been places Shafilea could have gone to or reached out to for meaningful help and protection long before it got to the point of a murder.
That said, I personally think good parenting means giving children privacy, even online, and doing so increasingly at ages set according to the maturity/capability of the child. That's the sort of thing a parent is in a better position to assess than the government. I also think that this particular law is garbage. I just don't think "We must protect children from their parents by allowing them to access the internet in secret and anonymity" is a very compelling argument.
I do, of course. It's just worth considering that not every parent is how you or I might like or imagine them to be.
For some children their parents finding out they're gay would cause a great deal of real world physical or phycological harm. It's a really tricky thing to navigate, but aside from saying 'no children should be allowed access to the internet unsupervised' it gets really difficult.
No, seriously, look up stats on who gets charged with hurting children and you'll see that it's mostly parents. Sure, once in a while there's a pedophile handing out candy from a van, but almost all of the time it's a parent or some other person trusted by the parents to watch the kid.
this is coming across as intentionally obtuse questioning. Many people, including governments think that adopting specific sexual preferences and identities is wrong and worthy of criminal charges and harassment at a minimum.
It's quite right that petitions are (mostly) ignored in Parliamentary matters, IMHO.
MPs are elected to Parliament, they get input from their constituents. Bills are debated, revised, voted on multiple times. There are consultations and input from a board range of view points.
A petition is in effect trying to shout over all that process from the street outside.
MPs belong to political parties - consider what happens if an MP's constituents and an MP's party disagree?
They might be allowed to vote against the government, if their vote will have no effect on the bill's passage - but if they actually stop the bill's passage? They're kicked out of the party, which will make the next election extremely difficult for them.
MPs are elected for reasonably long terms - and that means they regularly do things that weren't in their party manifesto. Nobody running for election in 2024 had a manifesto policy about 2025's strikes on Iran, after all!
That flexibility means they can simply omit the unpopular policies during the election campaign. A party could run an election campaign saying they're going to introduce a national ID card, give everyone who drinks alcohol a hard time, cut benefits, raise taxes, raise university tuition, fail to deliver on any major infrastructure projects, have doctors go on strike, and so on.
Or they can simply not put those things in their manifesto, then do them anyway. It's 100% legal, the system doing what it does.
I have just described how the public drives the democratic process to ensure everyone gets a voice, not just whoever shouts the loudest. That's the opposite of ignoring the public.
That's the nice-sounding theory, but I don't see any metrics on how well it works in practice. MPs aren't required to share the input from the public or publish lists of how they voted on every issue prior to elections. Representative democracy really includes very little accountability for the legislators.
It certainly works better than to govern according to whoever shouts the louder.
Petitions have a place, which is to inform of a point of view and of the opinion of a portion of the public. That's a form of lobbying. But that's it, we should certainly not expect that a law be repelled because of a petition, and rightly so.
Incumbents in a bad system always argue that it's better than their worst characterization of the alternative. The reality is that elected officials still have very little accountability. They're only subject to re-election once every few years and it's virtually impossible to get rid of one mid-term unless they get themselves arrested.
I get your point about petitions and direct democracy being a form of who shouts louder (in the media, advertising, # of campaign events etc), but this is equally true of regular elections. It's even more so in a first-past-the-post system like the UK, whose two major parties have no interest in shifting to a proportional representation system because it would advantage smaller parties at their expense, even though the result would more closely reflect public preference.
In my view, parliamentary systems developed a few centuries ago have their advantages but also come with a great deal of historical baggage (systems that benefit a particular class of candidate and so forth), and they're buckling under the pressures of a real-time information society where people know transparency and timely publication of information are technically possible but such goods are systematically withheld from the public.
You vote for someone who says "I will create more jobs"
They instead propose a bill that will cut jobs
There's deliberation, but a lot of other people want to cut jobs
Is you shouting "hey, that is not what I voted for!" yelling and disrupting process, or calling out the fact that you were lied to and your representative is in fact not representing you?
I wish that we didn't always have to phrase things like this. Yes, it's true that the aforementioned folks may likely have more of a need for anonymity than I do as someone who isn't a member of any protected class; but that doesn't mean I don't have a legitimate right to it too. And, if this is the way we phrase things, when a government is in power that doesn't care about this (i.e. the present American regieme), the argument no longer has any power.
We shouldn't have to hide behind our more vulnerable peers in order to have reasonable rights for online free speech and unfettered anonymous communication. It is a weak argument made by weak people who aren't brave enough to simply say, "F** you, stop spying on everyone, you haven't solved anything with the powers you have and there's no reason to believe it improves by shoving us all into a panopticon".
Totalitarian neoliberalism sucks; your protest petition with six million signatures is filed as a Jira ticket and closed as WONTFIX, you can't get anyone on the phone to complain at, everyone in power is disposable and replaceable with another stooge who will do the same thing as their predecessor. Go ahead and march in the streets, the government and media will just declare your protest invalid and make the other half of the population hate you on demand.
And also an exception for reporting security-related issues. Because if you try and charge people money to responsibly report security vulnerabilities, then they'll just end up taking the full disclosure approach, which is probably not what you want.
A lot of companies seem to have based their business model on the assumption that Google and Microsoft would continue to send them traffic for free indefinitely.
So now they're having to scramble to rethink their approach, and obviously aren't happy about that.
Plus the fact that you only have to give your credit card details to one large company that (hopefully) has some security professionals working for it, rather than dozens of smaller ones and hoping that none of them lose it/get compromised.
Somewhat. A lot of those recommendations seem to be of the type, “I bought the most expensive brand possible and it works great! No complaints after seven days of ownership”
Also frustrating when it might be, “Look at this 30 year old Craftsmen wrench.” Unfortunately, that 30 year old version is no longer made, as production has been MBAed and quality is now an afterthought because they can still sell the logo for a premium price.
I always found the latter to be a huge problem with that sub. So much stuff like "these products from X are the greatest thing ever...but that brand is terrible now, don't buy from them"
Turns out, BIFL products are only recognized as such in hindsight, which is often after enshittification hits.
I've found a good source of recommendations can be friends and family who bought something similar 3-4 years ago. If something is going to go catastrophically wrong, it probably will have happened by then, and it's still possible that the same product is available.
Sounds a bit like the old Problem Steps Recorder (PSR) tool in Windows. It was a little known tool that recorded keystrokes/clicks/screenshots, which was great for troubleshooting.
Sadly, the screenshots were all lossy jpegs, and it wrapped the whole thing into an mhtml file.
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