Lawmakers want to ban VPNs and have no idea what they're doing

It is the objective, it's always been the objective. The worst part is that I bet these people don't even think of themselves as authoritarian so much as they stumble into it through a combination of selfishness, ignorance, and complete disregard for ethics. They like money and power, more information means more of both, darn the torpedos, tap the lines, hit the gas and all of a sudden it's oops all facism.

The goal is controling the flow of information online. "protecting the children" may or may not be a sincere concern but ultimately censorship is what is desired here.

I think putting parents in control is the right path, but will reveal a sad fact.

Many parents aren't taking time to be in control, and no amount of legislation will fix that.

> And even if it isn't, this level of stupidity is harmful.

How much more proof do we need that we're speedrunning the authoritarianism and frankly we're already somewhat authoritarian, it's just pluralism for now. Wait until the elites eat each other and only one dictator is left.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip

In hindsight, they really misjudged how comfortable pedos would be with discussing their affairs in plaintext email.

Holding out for government IdP that can return verified but anonymous data (like age)--like a JWT that has no identifier besides an age claim.

Seems highly unlikely it would ever happen (at least in the U.S.) but seems like it'd solve a decent amount of verification problems. With a JWT, the IdP wouldn't even necessarily need to know the recipient since the validity could be verified by the consuming party using asymmetric crypto.

They mean "no privacy protection from the website", presumably. Websites getting compromised and leaking IDs is a big deal, now that we've decided that websites should be seeing our IDs.

My guess is that this data isn't secure even at rest, as the constant flow of data breaches has shown.

This sort of thing turns up very regularly in US politics, from the Comstock Laws to the Communications Decency Act. The late 90s even had a requirement to use easily breakable encryption (48-bit RSA) which big tech companies generally obeyed. And a worse proposal (the "clipper chip") which was never deployed.

Authoritarianism is not limited by your birthplace, it can turn up anywhere. And when it does people are often really enthusiastic about it.

Could be more serious than that, maybe it's not a lag. Maybe they are becoming.

The Great Firewall dates from 2003 and we still don't have a Great British Firewall so the lag seems longer.

It's not funny, it fucking sucks.

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If this keeps going, they will ban self-hosting next: only government-approved hosts allowed.

We can't just rely on technological solutions because you can't out-tech the law at scale. People need to actually understand that the government is very close to having the tools needed for a stable technocratic authoritarian regime here in the US and all around the world. It might not happen immediately even if they have the tools, but once the tools are built, that future becomes almost unavoidable.

I've been considering doing that, because it seems a lot of VPN owned IP addresses are being flagged.

> Isn't it Wisconsin law that lets the Governor change any numeric digits in a law while it's on his or her desk?

Pretty close.

> (b) If the governor approves and signs the bill, the bill shall become law. Appropriation bills may be approved in whole or in part by the governor, and the part approved shall become law.

> (c) In approving an appropriation bill in part, the governor may not create a new word by rejecting individual letters in the words of the enrolled bill, and may not create a new sentence by combining parts of 2 or more sentences of the enrolled bill

https://docs.legis.wisconsin.gov/constitution/wi_unannotated

The big limitation here is that it is limited to appropriations. Further, the constitution goes out of its way to try and prevent creative vetoing.

Unfortunately, the court decided that numbers are not words.

As a result, the governor changed "for the 2023–24 school year and the 2024–25 school year" to "for 2023–2425"

https://statecourtreport.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/wisco...

What if it’s a “thirty day” window? Safe?

Because you can't freely force social networks like HN to tie nicknames to a state IDs. Just because some politician said that doesn't make it so.

Not just social media, expect ANY app to be able to “verify” you through the new apple digital ID (android wallet soon I assume), the “verification is simple and seamless!!”, and add few Alegria drawings explaining why providing your ID helps defeating the “bad evil guys!!” and you are good to go.

And also to defeat AI slopbots!

To this day I have no clue what the point of this idea is. Forcing you to use an ID on the internet is the real world equivalent of making everyone you interact with take a photo of your ID. It's completely nonsensical.

Considering that most crimes require people to be physically present at the crime scene, it also doesn't seem to be a functioning deterrent at all in the real world.

Most of the bad behaviour is concentrated in "seedy" places, where you usually have to go out of your way to interact with that place. A real name policy doesn't change the nature of the place at all.

If anything, the places that would be most affected are the ones where people are roleplaying or pretending to be something other than "themselves". E.g. gay or transgender people, furries, MMO/MUD/MUSH players, streamers, etc which overall seem to be exceedingly harmless.

There is also the blatantly obvious problem that this only works on people who are risk averse to begin with. So it will basically have no effect on actual perpetrators, who see some risk vs reward tradeoff for their bad behaviour.