Always funny to see the senile politicians blaming porn as the biggest threats to children and not their collapsing economies.
I'm sure when those kids grow up and work long hours for the rest of their lives (if they can find a job at all!) just to be able to afford rent they'll at least be grateful they weren't able to access porn in their teenage years.
While the failing economies definitely is orders of magnitudes more important, the problem of hyper stimulants is definitely worth giving some attention.
The effects of porn, SoMe, ultra processed foods, etc. Likely also affect the real economies in ways wondo not yet fully grasp.
Might be somehow related-ish; in Poland by rmf24.pl outlet:
> On Friday, the Sejm (lower house) passed an amendment to the bill on the provision of electronic services, which allows for the blocking of illegal content on the internet. The new regulations anticipate that the president of UKE (Office of Electronic Communications) and KRRiT (National Broadcasting Council ) will be able to decide on the removal of content concerning 27 prohibited acts, mainly specified in the Penal Code. Prohibited acts include criminal threats, incitement to suicide, glorification of paedophilia, promotion of totalitarianism, incitement to hatred and content that infringes copyright.
> Under the bill, the author of the disputed content will receive a notification from the internet service provider about the initiation of the procedure and will have two days to present their position. The decision of the UKE and KRRiT to remove the content will not be subject to appeal, but the author will be able to lodge an objection with a common court.
> 237 MPs voted in favour of the bill, 200 were against, and five abstained. The bill will now be debated in the Senate.
This happens four days after Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Digital Affairs Krzysztof Gawkowski said that "Poland strongly opposes the introduction of mandatory scanning of private messages in instant messaging services.".
---
I don't want to wear a tinfoil hat but considering that chat control is unlikely to work at EU level, local "solutions" like above in Germany and Poland may give legal way to include scanning instant messengers in the future.
> I don't want to wear a tinfoil hat but considering that chat control is unlikely to work at EU level, local "solutions" like above in Germany and Poland may give legal way to include scanning instant messengers in the future.
That's because lawmakers think it has no impact on them. In Czech Republic a transparency law has been passed many years ago. This law effectively said that cities needs to disclose suppliers and agreements for services they are purchasing, like trash collection. Sounds pretty innocent.
It has turned out that politicians did not think that through because people found a lot of cities are buying services from companies which are owned by politicians who are also part of city council. Whoops, massive conflict of interests. So then politicians were clamping the law down until this got hidden under wraps again. All these Chat Controls, porn filters are going to have exactly same effect.
Every time when I see how these censorship laws are pushed, I cannot understand how it is possible that anyone of those who vote for them can believe that such laws can achieve their stated goal of "protecting the innocent children".
Actually I cannot believe that the voters, or at least most of them, are so stupid that they no longer remember what they were doing as children, so I can only assume that the real purpose of the laws is not the claimed purpose, but something much more sinister.
I am male, so I do not know about what young girls think, so perhaps they are innocent and they might be protected by censorship, but I am certain that the "innocence" of young boys cannot be protected by such laws, even if they were technically successful.
I have grown in a country occupied by communists, like Poland. There existed absolutely no pornography whatsoever. There were no erotic movies, no erotic books, no erotic magazines.
So one might have believed that the "innocence" of young children was "protected", but such a belief was terribly wrong.
Due to the lack of any other kind of entertainment, a favorite pass-time was telling jokes, many of which had a strong pornographic content. I have no idea which were the sources of the jokes, but there existed a huge number of them. Starting from the age of 10 years, it was very frequent among boys to tell such jokes or listen to them.
The content of the jokes included pretty much everything that can be seen in a pornographic movie today and any young "innocent" boy was very familiar with such content, even if most did not understand the meaning of many parts of the content, for lack of explanatory images.
Of course, no boy would admit in the presence of adults of being aware of such things, but I would have expected that someone being now adult would remember his lack of "innocence" when young and would understand how futile is to expect that "innocence" can be "protected" by technical censorship, when the only means that could ensure "innocence" would be to be locked permanently in a prison cell, to avoid contact with any other humans.
> Manufacturers of operating systems, tech associations, and the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) sharply criticize the draft law. They consider the filtering requirement, in particular, to be technically and practically unfeasible, as well as legally questionable.
* you add an HTTP header saying "I am a kid"
* porn web servers read and handle this headers
* if they don't (easy to test), they get fined
It is easy to implement, easy to monitor, and will probably just work if the government do the effort to monitor and enforce it. If not, it will just be an other DNT header
> The core of the JMStV amendment, which has been debated for years and to which the state premiers agreed almost a year ago: End devices that are typically also used by minors should be able to be switched to a child or youth mode by parents with filters at the operating system level at the push of a button.
⇒ This will require OSes to have a filter, but it doesn’t require it to be switched on, not even for children using computers. Whether to switch it on will be a parent’s choice.
Risk, of course, is that this will be sloppy slope. Parents who don’t switch it on for their kids may get seen as not caring enough for their children, effectively forcing parents to switch the filter on.
Seems really the only way forward is having your normal fast internet/live/banking/gov crap where you play a happy citizen role. And outside of that a mesh network where you really live. Sure not for most, but for me, yep.
It always puzzles me, why the porn? How about seeing war in action? Murders? How about fostering the gambling addiction via freemium games? Why seeing pussies, dicks and tits is more of a threat than anything else? This porn fixation is ridiculous.
Excessive Violence without proper context and explanation is also forbidden. And Porn is usually several lacking context and explanation, being just poor fiction. But the thing is, most people understand the regulation of violence, so you won't hear many complaints about those.
Quite the opposite. From the description in the article it will make Linux illegal unless distros and app stores comply with German law. It may ban installation of software from outside locked down app stores.
Linux might receive this too. Remember, Valve is using Linux for their Steam Deck/Machine/Flare, and they are selling well enough, that the law might apply to them at least.
I'm not really afraid of porn. That can be handled by talking with the kid. What I'm afraid of is the kid watching one of those awful NSFL videos. It'll eventually happen, but the later, the better.
Mind you this is the country with a state-administered church tax system. Of course they will be all against porn, something something protestant work ethics.
Unrelated, but shows the "slow collapse" of Europe (where I live in).
We all know what a big issue Climate Change (and specially warming in Europe) is. So most European politicians go on and on about environment and all that.
Well, yesterday, I went to play football at night and finished at around 10PM. I was planning on taking the metro, as any normal European citizen.
Much was my surprise when I compared the time and cost to a Car Sharing app (Free2move).
The metro in my city is €3,80 and Google Maps estimated a metro travel time of 30 minutes.
I ended up paying €3,64 for the Car and made it home in 19 minutes. Worst part, the car was not even electric.
It makes absolutely no freaking sense.
So yeah, European politicians are just scammers. They're doing their own businesses while claiming to protect the population.
With all respect, the car sharing you used is likely VC subsidized while the metro runs on much lower subsidies.
That said, public city transport should likely just be free. (not so much regional or national transport as the extreme congestion from the Deutschland ticket has shown)
> The aim is to protect young people on the internet from age-inappropriate content such as pornography, violence, hate speech, incitement, and misinformation.
Hmmm, I doubt they really care about pornography and more about censoring certain stuff that politicians do not like. But what do I know, I'm probably just a conspiracy theorist.
Well considering you can go to prison in Germany for posting a meme on social media, that ship has already sailed. This has been a thing for a while. The only difference with this is this gives some parents control over what they allow their children to see on their computers
That part also caused my tin foil hat to heat up. At least they get the credit of including it directly instead of adding it in a later revision that gets even less news coverage. It is hard not to grow cynical when you see this.
I am also worried about another detail:
> The states also want to prevent the circumvention of blocking orders by erotic portals ... using so-called mirror domains – i.e., the distribution of identical content under a minimally changed web address. For a page to be treated as a mirror page and quickly blocked without a new procedure, it must essentially have the same content as the already blocked original.
Note the part "quickly blocked without a new procedure" so there is a way to block sites with even less process and oversight. That just invites overblocking without accountability.
>The aim is to protect young people on the internet from age-inappropriate content such as pornography, violence, hate speech, incitement, and misinformation.
Who decides what hate speech is? Incitment? what the actual fuck. Linux is the way until they come for that as well.
Until Linux is going to be forced into the same regulation. And then until new laws criminalize attempts to bypass the "porn filter" no matter what you use.
I want a "one button solution" to keep the boomers and the elderly from getting their brains fried by facebook and voting for authoritarian parties that want to implement such antiliberal mechanisms
early cremation, not like they're any kind of useful nowadays. "but you'll be in their place someday", yes i'm sure of it, being poisoned physically and mentally by every single thing existing i'm pretty confident i'll live till 50.
"oh no, parents aren't using these tools we're forcing companies to implement, we gotta intervene to protect the precious children so we'll assume you're a children everywhere until we can link back your real identity somehow"
Whenever a new attempt at limiting exposure to what is obviously harmful content (e.g. explicitly violent content, and anything to do with minors), I always see the same patterns of argument against the attempt:
(1) It's the parent's fault.
(2) Freedom! No government censorship!
(3) This is technically impossible to control (the fix is worse than the problem.)
While each point can be argued, I think the debate needs to be framed a different way. We are facing a dosage and availability problem, just as in comparing, in order of harmfulness: coffee, alcohol, and heroin.
We know what happens when a harmful substance suddenly becomes widely available. Do people say "hey I drank some beer when I was a kid so all drugs are fine, including opioids, in unlimited amounts"? And, "if your kids gets addicted to opioids, it's the parent's fault for not keeping it away from them" (when your trusted doctor prescribed them first?) Or, "people are free to do what they want, and it is technically impossible to control the supply of opioids anyway, so why bother"?
The unfiltered internet is FLOODED with violent, disturbing pornographic images that literally NO ONE should ever see. It's not some sort of law of nature that this content exists - humans made it and put it there, and the wide availability and potency of this content is the problem. It isn't seeing someone's naked behind in a context-appropriate scene in a movie (that's closer to coffee in the above example.)
As it turns out, I think this law is a good step, but far from complete or perfect (or even good.). Requiring each individual to personally set up 100% effective filters is an impossible burden. For sure, when I had young kids a decade ago, I tried, and I also talked to my kids about it. But how about also that drug dealer isn't allowed to sneakily approach my kids with free samples? And I can reasonably expect that my kids aren't forced to walk through the floor of a casino, with all the flashing lights and prostitutes, on their way to school? Since most school work requires the internet these days, that's what it feels like as a parent.
I have two adult kids, one doing well (despite visiting some questionable sites as a youth, I found out later), and one struggling, in part from the crap that is found on the internet. I know many of my peers with young adult children are telling the same story - at least one of their kids is way off the rails with a serious real-life problem, usually fueled by the internet casino in some way (and before you tell me we were all bad parents, these are now adults in their 20's and 30's, who mostly seemed normal and well-prepared after high school.)
Now, I am not completely blaming the internet, an excellent tool that has improved many things in my lifetime, for these outcomes. But let's not kid ourselves - there is a huge distinction between, say, Google Maps, and animal torture videos.
This is a hard problem, with lots of nuance and gray areas. It's the entire reason that laws and courts exist - sometimes you really do just need to sit down with a group of people and come to some sort of solution, however imperfect, and iterate to make it better.
Because clearly something has to happen - the opioids coming through the municipal internet pipes aren't going to be completely remediated with a personal water filter. This law provides for free water filters, but ones that won't work everywhere without prohibition-like enforcement (e.g. open source, DIY distributions of Linux.) It's part of the solution, far from perfect, and far from complete. But we are done doing nothing.
I find it interesting how these kinds of measures are incredibly unpopular on HN and other online platforms. But if there was some regulation about social media algorithms, short form content, age restriction for social media and other mandated restrictions on social media companies, people are a lot more open.
Why is any restriction on adult content so fiercely defended? I can post that Mark Zuckerberg should be arrested and tried at the Hague and receive a somewhat warm reception on this platform. But there are these giant faceless corporations pushing unrestricted, often depraved content to minors and people stand up for them. And this content often includes anonymous uploaded content with underage girls. It's like the meme "leave those billionaires alone!"
I'm sure this will get downvoted, but help me understand what the visceral reaction is. I've heard people argue that this kind of adult content isn't harmful, but it seems obvious that it is, especially to children. At least more than short form content like TikTok. What would you rather your 12 year old spend hours watching? The adult industry has always been a few steps ahead of popular media in terms of virality, addiction and kitsch. They're shaping the online generation, and not in a good way.
Social media regulation isn't particularly popular here on HN, though it is certainly in other areas. You also won't find many people defending CSAM here as you imply.
You also have to assume that people are not taking the purpose of these new measures at face value, but assume that there are other underlying motives and that the measures are broader than just simple pornography. And I don't think that assumption is unjustified.
The ID-based measures like in the UK are a gigantic privacy nightmare as well.
These measures are also not specific to kids, in the end they essentially always affect the access to this kind of content by adults as well. And some people think that is none of the government's business.
An additional factor is that these measures are technically infeasibly without drastic measures. So they're either easy to circumvent, or would give the government enormous power and access over all kinds of communication.
Social media algorithm are being used to push agenda from other countries, see the Cambridge analytica case, or push extremist content to youngsters since it generates much more engagement.
Porn doesn't do this. It may have other issues, but it doesn't aim at maximing engagement with infinite scrolls and similar tactics. Let alone the content, who would watch porn for 12hrs/day? We already have the possibility to do that, and if somebody doesn't have mental issues, I'm of the opinion (s)he's not going to do that
It's the classic "think about the children" argument used to push through plethora of other shit. See UK.
I have very low trust in government (mine or other). We had these restrictions before. My country has been there, done that, for 41 years, not keen on repeat.
And unlike corporations (for all their problems and there are many), you can't avoid that.
> Why is any restriction on adult content so fiercely defended?
If you mean “why do people protest age verification” then the answer is that the only effective way to do age verification is by mandating login with government verified ID, which destroys anonymity. People aren’t upset about kids not seeing pron, they’re upset about the entire rest of the internet being subject to surveillance.
> But if there was some regulation about social media algorithms, short form content, age restriction for social media and other mandated restrictions on social media companies, people are a lot more open.
FWIW I am opposed to all such restrictions, although the restrictions on media companies (versus OS restrictions, chat control, etc) are slightly less bad because they don’t broadly constrain individual freedom in the same way.
My visceral reaction is to the slippery slope, and the fact that our government is not to be trusted.
I'm honestly not against blocking social media for children. It's just sad that we got to this point. In an ideal world, parents would be the gatekeepers and the reason for not allowing their kids to use TikTok would be that it's simply not good for them. But I'm not happy with the solution, which means that you need a way to prove your age and/or identity to all these sites. Mkey. I guess. For social media that's one thing, but you already see that they're very keen on applying that same thing for porn now? Why? That gives my government highly fucking sensitive information about me. I seriously detest that thought, so I'd rather just not give any government the tools to interfere and/or closely watch what I do.
Raising your kids is your responsibility, not mine. Don't push the consequences of your decisions onto me.
> But there are these giant faceless corporations pushing unrestricted, often depraved content to minors and people stand up for them. And this content often includes anonymous uploaded content with underage girls.
...right. You got a little too into the hyperbole here. All the remotely popular websites you may think of are restricted and are compliant with the law as far as monitoring for and removing CSAM content is concerned.
And this does not really need to be said, but nobody is standing up for anything related to such content.
Also quite obviously, people who upload such content are not going to be deterred by whatever regulation you can possibly think up.
> I'm sure this will get downvoted, but help me understand what the visceral reaction is.
"Here's a dead kid, now give up your rights."
> I've heard people argue that this kind of adult content isn't harmful, but it seems obvious that it is, especially to children.
Yeah, and I'm all for parental controls. So far as they do not infringe on my rights to say, privacy.
Why exactly can't we force phone manufacturers to engineer phones with the option to turn on "child mode" that gives parents full control and insight over everything the child does? Only whitelisted apps are allowed and there's a special web browser that only allows whitelisted websites. The parent gets to see a full audit of what the child has seen, including URLs visited. Done. No need to burden every single already existing OS and internet-facing software with this nonsense.
Oh, and take some responsibility for raising your own kids. I'm tired of increasingly being forced to do it for you.
*This does not seem like a censorship measure.* It seems like it requires OSs to give parents an easy way to filter porn.
I struggle with porn addiction. When I really fall back into it I act out 5-10 times a day. I can’t stop even if I want to. It distracts from work and from my real life relationships and girlfriend.
Everyone on HN loves to rag on social media because it’s so toxic. What about porn? If social media makes it easy to compare my “boring” life with “beautiful” influencer lives, why wouldn’t porn make my normal girlfriend and normal sex seem boring. Part of that is how young I found porn when my brain was still developing and forming how it processed sex and relationships. Porn makes me feel so depressed.
I am sure other people handle porn and social media better than me. And that’s ok, I respect that. *But even if you think porn is ok as an adult, can’t you see why adults should be able to have more control over what their kids see.* Yes if they are motivated kids will find it - I learned a lot of the engineering skills I have now getting around my parents blocker. *Not every kid is that good and this might help many.* If it’s not required to be on in the OS, what’s the harm?
P.S. if you struggle with something similar to me, look up SA, SAA, or SLAA.
Porn can be harmful, and it is an industry that dos a lot of damage to those working in it too.
There are better ways of doing this. For example require ISP provided routers to have built in parental controls or that people have the option of filtered connections, and ensure parents are offered child safe filtered SIMs at the same price as normal ones. It would not even require changing the devices.
The issue here is not having an easy way to block porn, the issue is enforcing it. And easy ways to block apps and websites already exist. One I can recommend is called Freedom.
Okay. I hear your struggles and want to ask: would you rather give others the tools to block your porn, or would you rather have easier access to help?
Reads like paid copypasta. In the unlikely case you're sincere, have you tried testosterone blockers medication? I checked out SLAA (SA and SAA yielded no results) and while learning to control yourself is nice, why should you have those urges in the first place if they are making your life miserable. I find most porn kind of boring and even icky. I would never get tired of seeing pretty women (especially naked), but porn itself is kind of meh.
I’m gonna go on a limb here and say that I like this draft.
It’s an opt-in measure for parents with a one-click solution. Think ad blocker but for adult content.
Parents have to actively enable it. It’s on the device itself, not in the internet backbone. No censorship happening; government doesn’t even know whether parents use it.
Step 1. Force companies to develop the censorship/surveillant technology by passing a law to make it available. Claim its to 'save the children' and/or 'fight terrorism', whichever threat is currently the most scary.
Step 2. Make the use of the technology optional, and fairly non-intrusive to ease acceptance and normalization.
Step 3. Make the technology mandatory for certain groups/areas like all schools or certain businesses. Or for people who work for them. Also incremental changes are applied which makes the system a bit more restrictive, and bit more surveillant.
Step 4. Make the technology mandatory for everyone (except politicians and certain private persons like CEOs of big corps)
Step 5. Continue incremental changes until the system completely transfers all real power and control of the system from the individual to the corporation/state.
Yeah, this is the right direction for moderation features in general assuming it's implemented offline on-device and works without contacting a remote server. It eliminates excuses to implement age verification online.
And it's correct in principle: each parent should be able to decide what their child sees, but not what anyone else's child sees. Parenting a child is the responsibility of that child's parents, but it is not the responsibility of governments or other people.
Though I do have some gripes with it being a mandate rather than a recommendation, it is a much better proposal than age verification or censoring the entire Internet.
Nextgrid|3 months ago
I'm sure when those kids grow up and work long hours for the rest of their lives (if they can find a job at all!) just to be able to afford rent they'll at least be grateful they weren't able to access porn in their teenage years.
tossandthrow|3 months ago
The effects of porn, SoMe, ultra processed foods, etc. Likely also affect the real economies in ways wondo not yet fully grasp.
taneq|3 months ago
bko|3 months ago
soraminazuki|3 months ago
asah|3 months ago
slightwinder|3 months ago
phatfish|3 months ago
[deleted]
yubblegum|3 months ago
+Should be clear is that exposing children to porn or normalizing porn in no way promotes "healthy economies" either.
pndy|3 months ago
> On Friday, the Sejm (lower house) passed an amendment to the bill on the provision of electronic services, which allows for the blocking of illegal content on the internet. The new regulations anticipate that the president of UKE (Office of Electronic Communications) and KRRiT (National Broadcasting Council ) will be able to decide on the removal of content concerning 27 prohibited acts, mainly specified in the Penal Code. Prohibited acts include criminal threats, incitement to suicide, glorification of paedophilia, promotion of totalitarianism, incitement to hatred and content that infringes copyright.
> Under the bill, the author of the disputed content will receive a notification from the internet service provider about the initiation of the procedure and will have two days to present their position. The decision of the UKE and KRRiT to remove the content will not be subject to appeal, but the author will be able to lodge an objection with a common court.
> 237 MPs voted in favour of the bill, 200 were against, and five abstained. The bill will now be debated in the Senate.
This happens four days after Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Digital Affairs Krzysztof Gawkowski said that "Poland strongly opposes the introduction of mandatory scanning of private messages in instant messaging services.".
---
I don't want to wear a tinfoil hat but considering that chat control is unlikely to work at EU level, local "solutions" like above in Germany and Poland may give legal way to include scanning instant messengers in the future.
general1465|3 months ago
That's because lawmakers think it has no impact on them. In Czech Republic a transparency law has been passed many years ago. This law effectively said that cities needs to disclose suppliers and agreements for services they are purchasing, like trash collection. Sounds pretty innocent.
It has turned out that politicians did not think that through because people found a lot of cities are buying services from companies which are owned by politicians who are also part of city council. Whoops, massive conflict of interests. So then politicians were clamping the law down until this got hidden under wraps again. All these Chat Controls, porn filters are going to have exactly same effect.
adrian_b|3 months ago
Actually I cannot believe that the voters, or at least most of them, are so stupid that they no longer remember what they were doing as children, so I can only assume that the real purpose of the laws is not the claimed purpose, but something much more sinister.
I am male, so I do not know about what young girls think, so perhaps they are innocent and they might be protected by censorship, but I am certain that the "innocence" of young boys cannot be protected by such laws, even if they were technically successful.
I have grown in a country occupied by communists, like Poland. There existed absolutely no pornography whatsoever. There were no erotic movies, no erotic books, no erotic magazines.
So one might have believed that the "innocence" of young children was "protected", but such a belief was terribly wrong.
Due to the lack of any other kind of entertainment, a favorite pass-time was telling jokes, many of which had a strong pornographic content. I have no idea which were the sources of the jokes, but there existed a huge number of them. Starting from the age of 10 years, it was very frequent among boys to tell such jokes or listen to them.
The content of the jokes included pretty much everything that can be seen in a pornographic movie today and any young "innocent" boy was very familiar with such content, even if most did not understand the meaning of many parts of the content, for lack of explanatory images.
Of course, no boy would admit in the presence of adults of being aware of such things, but I would have expected that someone being now adult would remember his lack of "innocence" when young and would understand how futile is to expect that "innocence" can be "protected" by technical censorship, when the only means that could ensure "innocence" would be to be locked permanently in a prison cell, to avoid contact with any other humans.
bko|3 months ago
The UK already arrests 33 people PER DAY for social media posts and that was in 2023.
If we're going to throw people in jail for posting political memes anyway, at least parents will have some control over what their children consume.
https://www.reddit.com/r/charts/comments/1mut3gv/12k_arrests...
IsTom|3 months ago
Lapsa|3 months ago
tardibear|3 months ago
vmaurin|3 months ago
It is easy to implement, easy to monitor, and will probably just work if the government do the effort to monitor and enforce it. If not, it will just be an other DNT header
designerarvid|3 months ago
The lives of others (Das Leben der Anderen) has 8.4 on IMDB.
anonzzzies|3 months ago
jones89176|3 months ago
Canada|3 months ago
If you can give children something that is basically whilelisted access then it reduces the need to try to filter the open web.
noobermin|3 months ago
trallnag|3 months ago
brodo|3 months ago
Someone|3 months ago
⇒ This will require OSes to have a filter, but it doesn’t require it to be switched on, not even for children using computers. Whether to switch it on will be a parent’s choice.
Risk, of course, is that this will be sloppy slope. Parents who don’t switch it on for their kids may get seen as not caring enough for their children, effectively forcing parents to switch the filter on.
anonzzzies|3 months ago
lifestyleguru|3 months ago
rckt|3 months ago
slightwinder|3 months ago
benbristow|3 months ago
graemep|3 months ago
slightwinder|3 months ago
adastra22|3 months ago
shaky-carrousel|3 months ago
tasuki|3 months ago
I'm 40 and what are you talking about? I've... seen stuff on the internet, but I think nothing my 15 year old self couldn't handle.
haunter|3 months ago
unknown|3 months ago
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aeze|3 months ago
nalekberov|3 months ago
slightwinder|3 months ago
santiagobasulto|3 months ago
We all know what a big issue Climate Change (and specially warming in Europe) is. So most European politicians go on and on about environment and all that.
Well, yesterday, I went to play football at night and finished at around 10PM. I was planning on taking the metro, as any normal European citizen.
Much was my surprise when I compared the time and cost to a Car Sharing app (Free2move).
The metro in my city is €3,80 and Google Maps estimated a metro travel time of 30 minutes.
I ended up paying €3,64 for the Car and made it home in 19 minutes. Worst part, the car was not even electric.
It makes absolutely no freaking sense.
So yeah, European politicians are just scammers. They're doing their own businesses while claiming to protect the population.
tossandthrow|3 months ago
That said, public city transport should likely just be free. (not so much regional or national transport as the extreme congestion from the Deutschland ticket has shown)
Mawr|3 months ago
The cost of a comparable single trip for me would be on the order of 5x more expensive, in favor of public transport.
If we take into account monthly tickets, it'd be on the order of 10x.
This isn't a fluke either, there is simply no way a single occupancy taxi service could ever cost less than mass public transport. You just got lucky.
BobaFloutist|3 months ago
Truly all European politicians are just scammers, and Europe is in a "slow collapse"
How sad.
mejutoco|3 months ago
fschuett|3 months ago
Hmmm, I doubt they really care about pornography and more about censoring certain stuff that politicians do not like. But what do I know, I'm probably just a conspiracy theorist.
bko|3 months ago
https://www.standingforfreedom.com/2025/04/11/german-court-p...
rft|3 months ago
I am also worried about another detail:
> The states also want to prevent the circumvention of blocking orders by erotic portals ... using so-called mirror domains – i.e., the distribution of identical content under a minimally changed web address. For a page to be treated as a mirror page and quickly blocked without a new procedure, it must essentially have the same content as the already blocked original.
Note the part "quickly blocked without a new procedure" so there is a way to block sites with even less process and oversight. That just invites overblocking without accountability.
xaxaxa123|3 months ago
Who decides what hate speech is? Incitment? what the actual fuck. Linux is the way until they come for that as well.
cynicalsecurity|3 months ago
creata|3 months ago
amelius|3 months ago
raffael_de|3 months ago
miroljub|3 months ago
jones89176|3 months ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Press_Freedom_Index
iammjm|3 months ago
hollow-moe|3 months ago
hollow-moe|3 months ago
unknown|3 months ago
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DyslexicAtheist|3 months ago
amelius|3 months ago
lan321|3 months ago
theturtle|3 months ago
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GlibMonkeyDeath|3 months ago
(1) It's the parent's fault.
(2) Freedom! No government censorship!
(3) This is technically impossible to control (the fix is worse than the problem.)
While each point can be argued, I think the debate needs to be framed a different way. We are facing a dosage and availability problem, just as in comparing, in order of harmfulness: coffee, alcohol, and heroin.
We know what happens when a harmful substance suddenly becomes widely available. Do people say "hey I drank some beer when I was a kid so all drugs are fine, including opioids, in unlimited amounts"? And, "if your kids gets addicted to opioids, it's the parent's fault for not keeping it away from them" (when your trusted doctor prescribed them first?) Or, "people are free to do what they want, and it is technically impossible to control the supply of opioids anyway, so why bother"?
The unfiltered internet is FLOODED with violent, disturbing pornographic images that literally NO ONE should ever see. It's not some sort of law of nature that this content exists - humans made it and put it there, and the wide availability and potency of this content is the problem. It isn't seeing someone's naked behind in a context-appropriate scene in a movie (that's closer to coffee in the above example.)
As it turns out, I think this law is a good step, but far from complete or perfect (or even good.). Requiring each individual to personally set up 100% effective filters is an impossible burden. For sure, when I had young kids a decade ago, I tried, and I also talked to my kids about it. But how about also that drug dealer isn't allowed to sneakily approach my kids with free samples? And I can reasonably expect that my kids aren't forced to walk through the floor of a casino, with all the flashing lights and prostitutes, on their way to school? Since most school work requires the internet these days, that's what it feels like as a parent.
I have two adult kids, one doing well (despite visiting some questionable sites as a youth, I found out later), and one struggling, in part from the crap that is found on the internet. I know many of my peers with young adult children are telling the same story - at least one of their kids is way off the rails with a serious real-life problem, usually fueled by the internet casino in some way (and before you tell me we were all bad parents, these are now adults in their 20's and 30's, who mostly seemed normal and well-prepared after high school.)
Now, I am not completely blaming the internet, an excellent tool that has improved many things in my lifetime, for these outcomes. But let's not kid ourselves - there is a huge distinction between, say, Google Maps, and animal torture videos.
This is a hard problem, with lots of nuance and gray areas. It's the entire reason that laws and courts exist - sometimes you really do just need to sit down with a group of people and come to some sort of solution, however imperfect, and iterate to make it better.
Because clearly something has to happen - the opioids coming through the municipal internet pipes aren't going to be completely remediated with a personal water filter. This law provides for free water filters, but ones that won't work everywhere without prohibition-like enforcement (e.g. open source, DIY distributions of Linux.) It's part of the solution, far from perfect, and far from complete. But we are done doing nothing.
bko|3 months ago
Why is any restriction on adult content so fiercely defended? I can post that Mark Zuckerberg should be arrested and tried at the Hague and receive a somewhat warm reception on this platform. But there are these giant faceless corporations pushing unrestricted, often depraved content to minors and people stand up for them. And this content often includes anonymous uploaded content with underage girls. It's like the meme "leave those billionaires alone!"
I'm sure this will get downvoted, but help me understand what the visceral reaction is. I've heard people argue that this kind of adult content isn't harmful, but it seems obvious that it is, especially to children. At least more than short form content like TikTok. What would you rather your 12 year old spend hours watching? The adult industry has always been a few steps ahead of popular media in terms of virality, addiction and kitsch. They're shaping the online generation, and not in a good way.
fabian2k|3 months ago
You also have to assume that people are not taking the purpose of these new measures at face value, but assume that there are other underlying motives and that the measures are broader than just simple pornography. And I don't think that assumption is unjustified.
The ID-based measures like in the UK are a gigantic privacy nightmare as well.
These measures are also not specific to kids, in the end they essentially always affect the access to this kind of content by adults as well. And some people think that is none of the government's business.
An additional factor is that these measures are technically infeasibly without drastic measures. So they're either easy to circumvent, or would give the government enormous power and access over all kinds of communication.
amarcheschi|3 months ago
Porn doesn't do this. It may have other issues, but it doesn't aim at maximing engagement with infinite scrolls and similar tactics. Let alone the content, who would watch porn for 12hrs/day? We already have the possibility to do that, and if somebody doesn't have mental issues, I'm of the opinion (s)he's not going to do that
mnau|3 months ago
I have very low trust in government (mine or other). We had these restrictions before. My country has been there, done that, for 41 years, not keen on repeat.
And unlike corporations (for all their problems and there are many), you can't avoid that.
zoklet-enjoyer|3 months ago
Parents can put filters on their kids' internet accessible devices and everyone should be happy.
taneq|3 months ago
If you mean “why do people protest age verification” then the answer is that the only effective way to do age verification is by mandating login with government verified ID, which destroys anonymity. People aren’t upset about kids not seeing pron, they’re upset about the entire rest of the internet being subject to surveillance.
iamnothere|3 months ago
FWIW I am opposed to all such restrictions, although the restrictions on media companies (versus OS restrictions, chat control, etc) are slightly less bad because they don’t broadly constrain individual freedom in the same way.
mavamaarten|3 months ago
I'm honestly not against blocking social media for children. It's just sad that we got to this point. In an ideal world, parents would be the gatekeepers and the reason for not allowing their kids to use TikTok would be that it's simply not good for them. But I'm not happy with the solution, which means that you need a way to prove your age and/or identity to all these sites. Mkey. I guess. For social media that's one thing, but you already see that they're very keen on applying that same thing for porn now? Why? That gives my government highly fucking sensitive information about me. I seriously detest that thought, so I'd rather just not give any government the tools to interfere and/or closely watch what I do.
Mawr|3 months ago
> But there are these giant faceless corporations pushing unrestricted, often depraved content to minors and people stand up for them. And this content often includes anonymous uploaded content with underage girls.
...right. You got a little too into the hyperbole here. All the remotely popular websites you may think of are restricted and are compliant with the law as far as monitoring for and removing CSAM content is concerned.
And this does not really need to be said, but nobody is standing up for anything related to such content.
Also quite obviously, people who upload such content are not going to be deterred by whatever regulation you can possibly think up.
> I'm sure this will get downvoted, but help me understand what the visceral reaction is.
"Here's a dead kid, now give up your rights."
> I've heard people argue that this kind of adult content isn't harmful, but it seems obvious that it is, especially to children.
Yeah, and I'm all for parental controls. So far as they do not infringe on my rights to say, privacy.
Why exactly can't we force phone manufacturers to engineer phones with the option to turn on "child mode" that gives parents full control and insight over everything the child does? Only whitelisted apps are allowed and there's a special web browser that only allows whitelisted websites. The parent gets to see a full audit of what the child has seen, including URLs visited. Done. No need to burden every single already existing OS and internet-facing software with this nonsense.
Oh, and take some responsibility for raising your own kids. I'm tired of increasingly being forced to do it for you.
rPlayer6554|3 months ago
I struggle with porn addiction. When I really fall back into it I act out 5-10 times a day. I can’t stop even if I want to. It distracts from work and from my real life relationships and girlfriend.
Everyone on HN loves to rag on social media because it’s so toxic. What about porn? If social media makes it easy to compare my “boring” life with “beautiful” influencer lives, why wouldn’t porn make my normal girlfriend and normal sex seem boring. Part of that is how young I found porn when my brain was still developing and forming how it processed sex and relationships. Porn makes me feel so depressed.
I am sure other people handle porn and social media better than me. And that’s ok, I respect that. *But even if you think porn is ok as an adult, can’t you see why adults should be able to have more control over what their kids see.* Yes if they are motivated kids will find it - I learned a lot of the engineering skills I have now getting around my parents blocker. *Not every kid is that good and this might help many.* If it’s not required to be on in the OS, what’s the harm?
P.S. if you struggle with something similar to me, look up SA, SAA, or SLAA.
graemep|3 months ago
There are better ways of doing this. For example require ISP provided routers to have built in parental controls or that people have the option of filtered connections, and ensure parents are offered child safe filtered SIMs at the same price as normal ones. It would not even require changing the devices.
iammjm|3 months ago
mavamaarten|3 months ago
Asooka|3 months ago
trallnag|3 months ago
Humperdunkel|3 months ago
earthnail|3 months ago
It’s an opt-in measure for parents with a one-click solution. Think ad blocker but for adult content.
Parents have to actively enable it. It’s on the device itself, not in the internet backbone. No censorship happening; government doesn’t even know whether parents use it.
It’s a good solution.
Eddy_Viscosity2|3 months ago
Step 2. Make the use of the technology optional, and fairly non-intrusive to ease acceptance and normalization.
Step 3. Make the technology mandatory for certain groups/areas like all schools or certain businesses. Or for people who work for them. Also incremental changes are applied which makes the system a bit more restrictive, and bit more surveillant.
Step 4. Make the technology mandatory for everyone (except politicians and certain private persons like CEOs of big corps)
Step 5. Continue incremental changes until the system completely transfers all real power and control of the system from the individual to the corporation/state.
txrx0000|3 months ago
And it's correct in principle: each parent should be able to decide what their child sees, but not what anyone else's child sees. Parenting a child is the responsibility of that child's parents, but it is not the responsibility of governments or other people.
Though I do have some gripes with it being a mandate rather than a recommendation, it is a much better proposal than age verification or censoring the entire Internet.