I noticed this a couple of years ago too, I just ignored the letters, continued to receive the emails, and they stopped sending me letters about it /shrug
Heads up, your privacy policy[0] does not work in dark mode - I was going to comment saying it made no sense, then I highlighted the page and more text appeared :)
I did something similar[0] in JS on a Christmas eve eve a while back - needs to run via a server now as Web Workers cannot be loaded from file:// anymore.
There's a giant difference between stopping kids having full reign on what is now essentially the whole world of information - and instant access to strangers, than there is making sure they eat healthy, help out, and don't have bad teeth .... but I'm sure you know that :)
The only difference is in parents who raise and protect their kids without needing a law...and people who want government to be mom and do it for them and are willing to make everyone else suffer for it :)
Yea, I think anyone who grew up at the start of the internet in homes realises just how different it is now, and that teaching your kids about how to be safe online etc is an important part of parenting. But we are at the point where we have some parents who always had access to what it is now, and don't see it as a bad place.
"Stranger Danger" is no longer don't get into a van with someone who promises you sweets kinda thing.
Yep, I bought a separate all-in-one computer that is in the living room, in full view of everyone else, so we can keep an eye on what is going on when they are using it.
We also have pi-hole running that blocks a lot of things, and can turn on and off certain domains (so they can play roblox etc for a short while, then its blocked again) and their devices are pretty locked down
All four of my daughters prohibit my 7 grandchildren from going anywhere near roblox. My grandchildren are currently ages 2-11 but my daughters are so outraged by what happens there that they say their children will never be allowed on roblox until they move out of the house. Apparently it is extremely predatory, lots of bullying, and highly sexualized - and while children are the site's target audience, the site provides no effective oversight.
Whilst I do kinda agree, I was just replying to the parent about what the punishment would probably be :)
But the problem is that people are NOT managing their own kids' shit, and now we have to have things put in place to try and counter that - and end up overreaching.
I'm more than happy to educate mine on how to be safe online, and to come and talk to us about stuff, other aren't, or are not aware they need to.
Perhaps buying internet means you have to sign a waiver saying that if anything happens because of the internet then that is on the parent(s)...
Consider a parent that uses mac address filtering to block access. Easy to implement on routers.
What happens when the parent goes to bed and the kid hard resets the router? Or the parent goes to bed and the kid spoofs the mac of the parent's device?
It's a good outcome! Let the cat and mouse games begin, and the youth will be more tech literate than ever. But I think punishing the parents is a bit much.
It'll probably eventually be like how modern folks treat play dates when they ask the counterparty if there are guns in their house and whether they're locked, etc. but with the internet: Do you have a central device management system with proper safeguards, logging, and ml running for anomaly detection on your network? Do you dpi? How do you prevent your kids from evil maiding you? Is your personal computer locked in a cage, and do you check all your paraphernalia for keyloggers, etc. before booting?
Such a waiver would be equally insane given the fraud and malfeasance that goes on every day it would be like signing a waiver saying whatever happens in the world is your fault for a drivers licence.
Instead how about we simply continue to make reasonable laws regarding behaviour and holding individual people and companies responsible when they violate the law.
Whilst we are at it we can keep content filtering for pre teens and imposed by parents and accept that teens are going to figure out how to get to the real internet at some point.
"Is this overkill for viewing the occasional Imgur image? Probably."
From the last couple of weeks of researching some stuff, it makes perfect sense - I keep stumbling across blogs and documentation that uses Imgur, and it's really quite annoying that I can't see the screenshot or image that is being referenced. It hasn't /quite/ hit the point to put something in place, but this is super helpful for the final straw - when it comes!
It's been eye-opening how far-reaching Imgur really is - for example, some of the images on the Core Devices (the new Pebble folks) website are actually on Imgur.
This simple block is relatively trivial to bypass - but if they disappear tomorrow, a lot of things break.
> but if they disappear tomorrow, a lot of things break.
Tale as old as time, long-running forums are graveyards of dead Photobucket, Tinypic and Imageshack embeds. Imgur has lasted longer than most but the cycle will probably repeat eventually, especially since they were acquired by faceless corpos a few years ago.
I've said before that the age of an internet user can be estimated by how many free image hosting services they have seen come and go, like rings on a tree trunk.
The Online Safety Act is clear-cut censorship but that's not why Imgur left the UK. They were facing fines for violating the UKs data protection laws, specifically a set of rules that were introduced years before the OSA was even passed. Their parent company hasn't pulled any of their other services from the UK either, which you'd expect them to do if their goal was to protest or avoid the OSA.
"There are laws in place to make sure our children are as safe in the digital world as they are in the physical world. TikTok did not abide by those laws." ... "When you sign up you can be targeted for advertising, you can be profiled, your data contributes to an algorithm which feeds content," said the Information Commissioner.
So even before the OSA, the idea was: social media sites using algorithmic feeds must prevent children's access, and just asking "are you over 13" isn't enough. That's a demand for age verification, in practice.
Overkill right now, probably, but the Government seems hell-bent on locking down access to more and more things that we see as completely normal, so I'd say that it's forward planning.
When that happens, most VPN providers will face similar destiny.
Which means that we'll all have to run our own VPNs, possibly masquerading as HTTPS traffic, if that remains viable against government interference (eg. they might ask to re-encrypt all traffic by ISP-level certs, and block any traffic unreadable by them).
also, if foreign servers notice no real loss of traffic because people just circumvent draconian censorship measures from authoritarian regimes, then they can more safely ignore them without real repercussions
the EU seems to be following soon, so it's important that people have readily available tools so the power dynamics change and it doesn't become economically unfeasible to refuse censorship pressures
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