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The death of anonymity for most people, yes. Not me though. I'm going to make my own internet. With blackjack. And hookers. And protonmail too, probably.
Proton mail is garbage and they will betray you.
Not sure why you're being downvoted.
Proton CEO praised a Trump admin. I prefer my net neutrality folks to not ever kiss the ring of any government.
How would one HYPOTHETICALLY get in on this at the ground floor?
I mean, the fediverse that you're already on already kind of is the ground floor. Most of these places are not going to be affected by age verification.
But if you want to climb a few floors up to where the blackjack and hookers are probably hanging out, there are things like I2P it's delightfully sketchy. the best kind of sketchy.
It actively divests itself from any centralized shit like SSL or DNS, it's a raw HTTP only darknet that operates through its own peer-to-peer proxy network, totally anonymized and encrypted and segregated from any hint of open network traffic.
That makes no sense, when the age verification is being pushed to the OS and ISP levels.
Sure, you can connect to Lemmy, and not have to prove your identity to Lemmy, but Windows users will have to prove to microsoft, and also you'll have to prove it to Verizon, or Comcast, or whomever your ISP is.
So before you even turn on your computer, you've already proved your identity twice.
I don't have to worry about my OS because it's open source. Yours should be too. They can't actually enforce age verification on an open source OS because my OS can lie, and I can use its source code to make it lie if I have to (which I won't, because many other people will do it for me). For that matter they'll find ways to make Windows lie too, but you still shouldn't be using it, it's shit.
I don't have to worry about my ISP either because I live in a still-civilized country, but yeah, if they really lock it down at that level that's going to be tough, you'll probably have to identify someone for that if that's the next place where they go to. There are countermeasures and workarounds though. VPN, mesh networking, borrowing somebody else's wifi or mobile data hotspot, finding open networks. Maybe we'll get to the point where we need point to point links, pirate satellites, datajacking ourselves into communication lines, who knows.
But we're not there yet. We'll continue to develop more countermeasures as these sorts of hostile police surveillance state measures encroach on our freedom as it becomes necessary. You don't have to let your identity be associated with anything beyond your ISP if you're only using your ISP to get to somewhere you do trust with a VPN. If they block VPNs, then we will find other ways around the blocks. Are you familiar with I2P? If you aren't, maybe you should get familiar with it. We already have plenty of ways of sneaking information into and out of even more totalitarian of states like China, Russia, at least until there's an absolute shutdown like in Iran. You should also consider not living in a totalitarian country, and doing what you can to stop yours from becoming more totalitarian, because it's only going to get harder the longer you let them do this. Give them your ID in exchange for internet access for now if you absolutely have to and can't find any other option, but you might not absolutely have to, yet. And if you do have to, do it with caution: start learning and planning what you're going to have to do after that and how you're going to get very active in your resistance to being monitored and observed.
You sound like you've got a little bit of learned helplessness, but people in shitty, scary countries have been dealing with this for a long, long time. Yes, it sucks, but it's not the end of freedom. You have to learn how to fight it.
Ugh. That's disgusting on a thousand levels. Even proposing such a bill should be considered a jailable violation of the constitution, as an example to the rest of the authoritarian bastards.
I mean, I agree with you, but this isn't just a United States thing. China has had this since forever. They have something called a "social credit score".
So if you litter, and cameras catch you littering, your social credit goes down. And you best believe they track and monitor every single online interaction.
The UK the past year has been really slamming hard on online verification.
This is a global thing that is seeping into the united states, but it's by no means the only point of contention.
Oh yeah, 1000%.
It really sucks seeing supposed democratic nations having this forced on them. I really hate how little people understand the implications in practice.
China's "cameras up everyone's nose" approach should be a sign of failure and a caution to the world, not permission for other governments to "catch up". :(
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yea. I already have my own internet with blackjack and hookers and don't rely much on anything else. I'll be fine. But the vast majority of people will willingly rush into 1984 instead of throwing their shit devices away.
Oh that sweet scrolling rush....
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if they want to censor and monitor the internet, its time to start building on a new one that's private and encrypted by default: https://reticulum.network/
This is interesting, I think people should be aware of and check out i2p as well. I actually don't use it (because there's not that much of a community yet 😭) but I run a i2p router to support the network, that bitch does ~15TB a month in bandwidth. I think the main use of the network is torrenting currently.
But with governments and tech companies getting so oppressive hopefully i2p and other similar systems can flourish into the new free net.
I agree with the notion, but I'm mildly concerned with the fragmentation of solutions. We already have I2P, Yggdrasil Network, Gemini Network, the cjdns ecosystem, just to name a few. You can just run nodes on all of them at once, but that restricts accessibility to those who have the raw compute (and bandwidth) necessary, which isn't exactly conducive to what I'd consider a truly "open" internet, especially in the third world.
I think fragmentation is great. Shows there's varied interest in the space and allows them to evolve. Let the best one stand the test of time!
A quick overview of the difference in the tech stacks:
| Network | Can run without IP? | Can run without ISP? | Primary Physical Medium |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reticulum | Yes (Identity-based) | Yes | Radio (LoRa/HF), Serial, Wi-Fi Mesh, Ethernet |
| Yggdrasil | No (Uses crypto IP) | Yes | Wi-Fi Mesh, Ethernet |
| cjdns | No (Uses crypto IP) | Yes | Wi-Fi Mesh, Ethernet |
| I2P | No (Overlay) | Mostly No | Existing Internet (TCP/UDP) |
| Gemini | No (Application) | No | Existing Internet (TCP) |
I LOVE reticulum, the idea anyway. I2P is a great idea too. I run an I2P node just to contribute.
I started up reticulum on my Linux box, added sideband to my Android, setup an rnode. it was marginal. Text chat worked 90% of the time, I got a single image to come through, then never again. Something about it was either broken, or something I was doing was incompatible, but there weren't enough logs for me to figure it out.
I'm down with the while second internet over encryption, but none of them are straight forward enough I could get anyone outside of my extreme tech circle to consider it.
I didn't read the whole doc. How would this prevent kill switch network if the government can just tell internet service providers to shutdown the network?
This is the obvious end goal. Never had anything to do with children.
The poor police forces and intelligence agencies can't firebomb your house when you're talking bad about the pedo class online without your ID attached.
Billionaires and politicians are people too, you know :'(
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We should not platform idiots just because they state the obvious, when they promote bullshit out of the other side of their mouth.
Edit: removed the link because news site is grabby. Look it up, nerds.
Edit2: maybe this link is better idk https://techstory.in/proton-mail-faces-backlash-over-claims-of-political-neutrality-amid-ceos-praise-for-republican-party/
I found some other articles that didn't ask for my email.
That's unfortunate. I was actually about to get Protonvpn next month. I did a quick search on Nordvpn and I can't find anything about supporting or praising Republicans.
I looked into the features and specs of a lot of VPNs and it came down to those two. I was going to use Proton so I could set up my own mail and other accounts. Guess I'm using Nord
Sorry, it didn't do that to me. Maybe my plugins. I went to look it up on archive.org and they ALL did it to me, lol.
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The age verification is really just an alternate means for these companies to try to find out which of us are real people or not with the intent to scrape AI training materials more "cleanly". But it's all moot in the long run, as it turns out that it will be easy for anyone who wants to break the law to pretend to be someone they aren't.
In a world where identity theft is more rampant than ever, you'd have to be some kind of numbskull to think that this will be effective at doing any of the intended affects. It's literally a complete waste of time & money.
Unfortunately it seems like 90% of the population has to learn lessons by experience, constantly and repeatedly, rather than listen to the other 10%
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This way, identity theft can be catastrophic, more so than it already is
For once Yen and I see eye to eye.
given it's just because it will hurt his business, but i'm still happy for some W
So if you don't accept this "age verification patch" to your OS (and you know they won't stop with that), I assume that any attempt to connect to a website that does this check will fail and you won't be able to connect to it, right?
Well, I am just FINE with that. If I can't connect to a website, I will treat it like any other broken website and move on to another one. This is how the Internet routes around damage.
Totally valid idea, you just need to hope that there are enough people with you to give that decision weight or you'll eventually run out of alternatives.
Maybe that asshole shouldn't have been supporting the fascists then...?
Meta is pushing this so Zuck doesnt get sued for addicting kids. He can point his finger and say its the parents fault for kids seeing bad or addicting content. We are losing our rights and our privacy because a shithead like zuck doesnt want to get rightfully sued.
That's why they're fuckin doing it.
I hate short replies that don't add much (so added more than agreed!) but I've always enjoyed being anonymous in forums, I'm quite a shy person.
Never was a jerk intentionally or anything just said my bit. But everyone possibly knowing who I was I'd probably say nothing ever. Fuck it I was private before I can be private later. But I'm old and recall before Internet when I had no (or little) interaction.
Like we all haven't seen data breeches over the years....oh it's the government that holds the master authentication? Fuck that shit is all. Nothing, from a person who does programming these days, like that is remotely better.
Some countries may be better but we're all democratic right? Takes a single election till shit stops working as a safeguard, then new ones in make a different law. The whole system was not built for current tech.
This is an easy fix. We just make our own internet. With the usual, blackjack and hookers.
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What is being pushed for implementation is better described as identity verification, not age verification.
I would have little issue with a solution that purely gated services on age in a secure and privacy respecting manner. This OS level garbage is not that, its creating an oligarchy run identity gate to control access to personal computing.
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this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2026
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