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Yes. Regular everyday people are not capable of doing this due to tech illiteracy.

People are not saying to themselves, "I could figure this out and I'm choosing not to." They don't even know it exists.

Even if they did know local filtering exists, it wouldn't be effective. We have influenze vaccines and still, with their own lives on the line, hundreds of thousands of people die from the flu. The inconvenience is showing up at a Walgreens or CVS. They can't do it. We're expecting folks to understand mac and domain based allow lists?

Let me ask you this, if you asked your parents how they would secure their network for their grandchildren, that they would accomplish this solution on their own?

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I would expect them to tell me to do it. But also I expect to have device management on my children's devices such that if their traffic isn't proxied through my proxy, they won't be able to send or receive packets.

The kids could use the grandparents' computers. They could also just stick a USB with Ubuntu on it and live boot to get around the proxy restrictions unless the bios is locked.

I expect kids to get around the controls. That's how they'll learn. I don't expect to have to descend into full surveillance because Jimmy can't be bothered to solve his own problems.


It sounds like you're volunteering to secure everyone else's devices because that's how you solved the problem of grandparents not knowing how to do it themselves.

I'm arguing in good faith. My point was that some people will ask those that are tech literate. Some people can hire people that are tech literate.

I see no point in introducing this legislation, because the folks that can't take the time to meet their goals under the current norms will fail to secure the trivial bypasses that will allow kids to circumvent these controls.

But what may happen is those folks that are arguing for this legislation will argue for fully secure, remote attlestation to prove age for all devices that try to connect to the internet via an isp or some gov auth factory because the current, dumb law isn't good enough. This is a very slippery slope. The gov, private orgs all salivate at the possibility of that data and fully deanonymizing the internet. That is a world that is unacceptable. It would be the full loss of general computing. What a dystopia. And this is step one in that direction.


Everything is a slippery slope. That undermines the argument rather than strengthening it.

The reality is that people aren't doing this. Saying "parents should X" feels good, but changes nothing.

Please think like an epidemiologist rather than an engineer. This isn't an engineering problem. It's a public health problem. We're asking for the pump handle to be taken away and folks are saying we should keep the pump and that parents should simply walk farther for clean water for their kids. It's an absurd response that misses the point.


I appreciate your perspective, but I can't imagine this as a public health issue. Maybe as my kids get older my perspective will change.



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