UK Online Safety Act

General IF Community Resources
164

If the children want to look for porn, they’ll find it. Curiosity and the natural drive will kick in, and they WILL find ways around restrictions, because that’s what children do as they grow into their various teenage years. I personally think we shelter kids too much and mistify the whole thing too much.

Having said that, the two hugely real issues are:

a) children don’t have the ability (neither do an alarming number of adults) of using the internet safely and with the proper knowledge of what it is exactly they are looking at and how that will affect them.

b) predators will exploit the above to groom and abuse them.

b) is certainly a problem, and working on a) may alleviate it but never solve it. Then again, it might help a LOT.

The real issue is internet education, and possibly monitoring the child’s usage of internet. In this ever-more-demanding world, many parents will say they have no time to do that… having no children I won’t comment, but if children aren’t educated to use a tool properly, maybe best they are not allowed to use the tool at all. Which is ridiculous because it’s ubiquitous. Therefore they must be educated, and internet for them must be child-proofed like you’d child-proof the corners of your tables and your power sockets…

…but it’b be silly to expect every single place you take your child to to have the same child-proofing.

Anyway, these are just my thoughts on the matter. Children are curious, and they will start to have a sex drive, and by the time they do, if their curiosity prompted them to learn a bit more about it that’s a plus. The problem is not access, is education. But that’s much harder to fix, so they just restrict.

Accourse, I’m fixating on sex (you can quote me, just maybe not out of context. Oh well, what the hell). There are other things. But sex is usually the big one.

Side-story, I grew up with many adventure games, including some AIF and the Leisure Suit Larry series (though I remember explaining to my mother that in the Naked Gun, in the sex scene, they used condoms so they wouldn’t have babies. The joke of the condom being entire-person size was lost on me at the time. My point was, I was curious even way before). In LSL6 Larry finds a rather beautiful dark-skinned lady who then, at the time of action, turns out to have more equipment downstairs than he’d have preferred. Larry himself has a huge overreaction, puking and brushing his teeth compulsively the next day for having kissed them (the joke didn’t age well, but I’d argue that it still mocks people like Larry without being necessarily on their side, so it works).

And I was like, “huh. This is interesting. She doesn’t look any less beautiful. Maybe… even more so?”

A little seed of a notion that was planted in me early on, that helped me broaden horizons (which I wouldn’t know what to do with for a long time), and which I am glad to have experienced.

Knowledge is good. Exposure is good. Knowledge of what you’re being exposed to - and whether you want to be exposed to it - is the key, and children don’t have that, but they have to be taught it at some point…

165

That’s unfortunate. A society without privacy and anonymity is a society without freedom.

166

Larry’s reaction mentioned above sounds a bit over the top, but I’m not sure I can fault a straight guy being squicked out because what he thought was a ciswoman turned out to be a drag queen, very feminine gay guy, or trans woman. I don’t know anything about hook up culture, but being upfront about what bits you have in your pants/under your skirt seems like something that should be common courtesy for that kind of thing. Granted, that’s assuming Larry doesn’t have a problem with drag queens, homosexuals, or trans persons and just isn’t interested in hooking up with people with manly bits and was feeling a bit lead on.

And yeah, education is important. Knowledge is power, ignorance is impotence and all that… Sadly, there seems to be a lot of overlap between those who think censorship and age restrictions will actually be effective at protecting youths from the less savory parts of humanity and those who are anti-education. The people screaming about the evils of porn are the same folks trying to deny that adolescents are sexual beings and pushing abstinence-only or even no sex ed… And I never hear anyone in favor of age gating social media talk about teaching teens social skills relevant to digital communications.

167
CW: murder, hate crimes

Not to get too into the weeds, but be careful with this sort of thing. It’s a sensitive topic in the queer community because, until recently in much of the world, killing someone because you found out they were gay or trans could be considered self defense (and thus not murder).

168

Larry-wise, I think that the game was obliviously playing it for a joke, without giving it much thought, without malice and without much consideration. I also seem to remember that I think you could tell from the dialog that the trans had hinted a bit and gotten the impression that Larry knew and was ok with it. At any rate, his reaction is not one I defend, but it’s LSLarry: him being put it unexpected situations that he doesn’t like and making fun of that is pretty much part of the game, and he was never meant to be a broad-minded person.

If I encountered the scene today for the first time, without the innocence of nostalgia, I probably would be much less lenient, internally, about it.

But again, funny thing, at a time when I heard homophoboc slurs thrown around meant to be insulting and when it was a matter of social survival (and a matter of whether or not you’d ever get any dates) to affirm your heterosexuality (at the time, in my setting, being cis was implied; I remember no mention of trans one way or the other, they simply didn’t exist in that place at that time in our world), that throwaway joke did quite a bit to insert a bit of “something else” in my world. I always felt a bit sad for the lady and thought Larry was missing out on something.

Ultimately of course I believe the whole joke is that she hinted at it but he didn’t get the hints, so the usual humiliation followed.

The retching and the gargling (because they had kissed) I could have done without.

Let me see if I can steer this back on topic (my fault): yeah, the internet will get people exposed to stuff. Much like, say, entering a certain neighbourhood or visiting a certain country. But if politicians tell people “it’s your responsibility to educate the children about the internet”, even if they add “and we can throw in some educationam programs to help and maybe add it to school curriculums”, they’ll lose votes. So they don’t say it, and don’t do it.

169

Admittedly, I’ve never played Leisure Suit Larry, so don’t know the full context and I enjoy a lot of politically incorrect humor guilt free, so maybe I’m a bit overly desensitized. Just saying I don’t equate not wanting to date/hook up with someone of group x as equating to a general hatred of group x.

170

There’s obviously a world of difference between generally “not wanting to hook up with someone” vs. becoming shocked & disgusted by the realization that you briefly experienced attraction to a person who you, on some level, believe that you’re not “supposed” to be attracted to.

171

More on topic … if you’ve been following the California operating system-level age verification law, there is some good news — Linux and FOSS operating systems probably won’t need to comply if the law is enacted.

Assembly Bill 1856 (AB 1856), currently moving through California’s legislature ahead of committee reviews in June, would amend the state’s earlier age-assurance law by excluding software distributed under licenses that allow users to “copy, redistribute, and modify the software.”

The legal language doesn’t name FOSS or Linux specifically, but the general expectation is that the rule will only apply to commercial operating systems.

Some people say that this would be impossible to enforce anyway. Similar to calls to ban VPNs, it’s hard to crack down on developers and users that don’t do age verification.

However, if the vast majority of the internet (or just the biggest websites) decided to blacklist VPNs or non-age verified OSes, top-down enforcement wouldn’t even be necessary. So these things are still a problem looming on the distant horizon.

172

Thanks for this. Putting in the OS is the way it’ll be going i think. Ten years ago i said it wont be long before we have to “login to the internet” and this is basically it. If your age is verified, then you are verified. Same thing.

I don’t think any of this is really about protecting kids at all. It’s about preventing people from accessing free speech and escaping the purview of big business.

What will happen, of course, is that websites and payment systems will just stop working on Linux. These amendments are on purpose to make you think “Phew! At least i can use Linux”. Relax, and stop following this evilness - which of course could be stopped instantly if enough people said so.

For example, have you noticed that none of the AI providers work if using a VPN?

173

As with all things, it’s a matter of framing.

The Leisure Suit Larry series is (obviously) a work of fiction, and one written by men. It’s also a comedy. And yes, we’re supposed to be laughing at Larry and the situations he gets himself into, but this is of course filtered through what the writers thought was funny back in the 80s and 90s.

The punchline of this situation is that in his quest to get laid Larry has done something framed as gross, disgusting, and beyond the pale: kissed another man. It’s not about ethics in real world hookups but about the framing of homosexuality and gender nonconformity as a gross thing and a punchline, and (to a lesser degree) of casting trans women and gay men as predators trying to trick straight men into bed. Which is, as @Draconis mentioned, an attitude that has terrible real world consequences.

174

Agreed. What’s annoying here in the states is that both parties promote this insanity, so there’s no easy escape.

I will never go back to using a commercial OS or closed source software. If the day comes when I can’t use Linux to interact with commercial and government sites, then that will be the day I stop interacting with them, damn the consequences.

175

I concur and agree with you and Mike, noting that in Italy (and EU in general) is much easier dealing in-person with shop keeper/employer and bureaucrats because of the much smaller and densier EU urban centres and effective mass transportation re. USA.

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

176

Regarding California’s Digital Age Assurance law:

That’s good news, but I’m skeptical of how it’ll work out. Clearly the primary targets (in terms of the burdens imposed on OS providers) are iOS and Android. But the latter is (mostly) open source.

This started as, and will continue to be, a fundamentally broken law. That’s regardless of the intent. There are contradictions in the definitions that render it uninterpretable (e.g., in the pre-amended bill, the “Account Holder” and the “User” are different people, and only children are users.) There are other logical conundrums and law-versus-reality mismatches that are unresolvable. I get that new laws can be imperfect and will be fixed later. But it’s utter incompetence to enact a law this broken from the outset.

But we’ll never actually fix it entirely because the selective prosecution built-in will function as a Band-Aid. Most people will never learn how broken it is unless a rogue state attorney general tries to prosecute someone using an interpretation that doesn’t align with the political position of whoever’s in charge then.

177

In yet a further step along the road to a China-style internet ban, Kier Starmer has now announced a complete ban on Social media for all under-16s, to be introduced next year.

178

The clever bit is the UK will be expecting everyone else (ie platforms) to do their Chinese censorship for them. How clever is that! It worked with ifdb, that afaik still mostly blocks the UK.

Edit: hello WeChat!

179

Can confirm use of IFDB in the UK is completely unaffected. It’s the IF Archive that’s still off-limits due to a tagging backlog.

180

Sorry, thanks for the clarification.