We do need parental guidance like in the physical world, but such guidance should be issued by the parents, not the tech companies. Age verification is about giving your age and some other identifying metadata to the tech companies, and they hold the authority to decide what to filter. It should be other way around. The companies should expose metadata about their service and the content in their feeds via public APIs, and let people filter stuff locally on the device per the device owners' aka the parents' preferences. Oh wait. Such features will never reach mass adoption in the current software ecosystem. Software antitrust is a joke. These companies and the feds have the opposite incentives and do everything to sabotage local solutions. They've locked down what OS you can run on the hardware you bought, what apps are approved on their walled garden OS, and only the official apps can access their APIs. You don't have root on your own phone and it's a brick without remote authentication. Now they can sell you parenting plus many other things as their exclusive cloud service because "the market failed to deliver" and you can't really control what software runs on your own phone, much less your child's phone. This is the upstream problem and we ought to see it clearly and assign the blame correctly rather than trust those who deliberately created the problem to solve it.

The first three are physical things, not information. Porn can be debated, but the current age verification push is trying to impose blanket control on the entire information ecosystem. It's the digital equivalent of requiring ID to go anywhere or do anything, rather than just a few well-defined things.

Even if we view it as a good faith attempt (which it is not, remember what Edward Snowden exposed), the parental authority over a child's information diet is being transferred away from parents to tech companies. They're legally mandating you to give away your child's personal info (just age for now, but they'll demand more if we give them this) and make the decisions on what is suitable, instead of you making those decisions for your child.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XZ_Utils_backdoor

The StartWrt port supposely adds some nice features, of which VPN chaining looks especially useful. And a better UI will make it more accessible. There are plenty of people out there who are willing to switch out their routers and chain VPNs to escape gov/ISP/big tech surveillance but don't have the technical means to do so. These are welcome improvements to reduce friction if they manage to pull it off.

The specs are not too bad for the price considering this is a startup project. It has 8 cores with per-core performance similar to Cortex-A55 + 4GB LPDDR4 + 16GB eMMC, which is better than most off-the-shelf routers. I wish they released the WIP schematics and code though, because there seems to be nothing at the moment.

The loudest ones are not aligned with eachother. Their efforts to influence public opinion will neutralize eachother, and none of them can gain moderating power over the platform because the platform is just protocols. Ideas will clash, leaving only what people think is good in common. And that is the definition of the common good.

Do you have any better ideas? Or do you think that you possess the superior definition of "good" such that public discourse to search for it is unnecessary?

Those are centrally controlled systems where propangandists have home field advantage (email is debatable, it's halfway, it wasn't designed with the existence of companies like Google in mind). But even if that wasn't the case, it's not the same phenomenon as bots on social media. The important difference is that on social media, if there is no central moderation, the bots will cancel out eachother's influence. If I make an anti-propaganda email bot, it doesn't lower the ranking of the propaganda that's already in your inbox. But if I have an upvoting bot for their downvoting bot, they neutralize eachother.

Also, ensuring that nobody except the participants of group chats and DMs can figure out eachother's real identity is already a massive win. That alone makes it a lot harder to beat a population into submission.

When everyone can talk without censorship and fear of persecution, the best ideas might not always win, but the good ones usually will, and the worst ones will always lose. This is why every authoritarian regime needs censorship to survive.

For public feeds, you seem to assume that only the propagandists can leverage bots effectively, which is the right assumption for the centrally-controlled social media platforms of today. But if we make a platform that is just some protocols that can't be controlled by anyone, you and I would be able to spin up anti-propaganda bots to pwn the propaganda bots without fear of repercussion. Anyone can try to push public opinion in a specific direction, but someone else will simply go the opposite way. There would be no moderator or algorithm to artificially boost one type of noise over another, so we would actually get a less corrupted feed that accurately represents what people are thinking because the noise cancels eachother out. And if you want to customize the feed, we could make client-side filters and algorithms. There could be an open-source algorithm called "Hacker News" that you can just download and install into your open-source social media client.

As for keeping the powerful in check, don't forget that we've kind of lost equality before the law at this point, as shown by the Epstein saga. If we try to remove anonymity from the Internet right now, it will only be used to surveil regular citizens but not the people we need to keep in check. I would happily support a law that selectively enforces the other way around, though: let's mandate real identity for all government personnel online and expose their Polymarket accounts.

We're far from achieving this goal, and we underestimated our opponents by a lot. But it would be foolish to blame the Barlows of the world instead of blaming the tyrants and corporate opportunists that go to great lengths [0] to sabotage and interfere.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden#Revelations

Instagram is not comparable to Telegram. It is closed source, so there's no way to verify that it's doing E2EE.

> DOGE strengthened the surveillance state. It does not matter whether or not it's tied to a singular intentional plot.

That's not what you originally implied, but no matter. DOGE probably strengthened surveillance capacity within the government as a side effect of its auditing work, but I don't think it added any new capability to surveil citizens that the NSA did not already have.

As for Musk being a proponent of surveillance and censorship, there's a difference between an individual surveiling and censoring users on a platform he bought vs the government using mass surveillance and censorship against its citizens.

After Elon bought Twitter, he is like the Discord mod of his giant server, and doesn't want people to go to other servers. I don't think there's much more to it than that behind the ban of Signal links on X. He had previously banned other platforms' links on a whim as well [0]. He enforces his own rules on his own platform, but he's outspoken against government surveillance and censorship. He's somewhat hypocritical value-wise in this regard, which is one of his flaws, but he's also not the government. And even so, Twitter still manages to have looser speech restrictions nowadays than it did in 2021.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/18/23515221/twitter-bans-li...

I'm aware that Telegram is not E2EE by default, and you have to turn it on manually. But it's not true that Elon has long been rallying against Signal. In fact, he endorsed Signal a while back along with Edward Snowden. He also later criticized Signal, as well as other encrypted messaging apps. I remember seeing a podcast clip of him saying something along the lines of "none of them can really protect against the government spying on him", which is true. If you're a high profile individual like Musk, nation states will expend lots of resources to spy on you, and no messaging app will protect you from that. The point of encrypted messaging apps like Signal and Telegram is to raise the per capita cost of doing surveillance so that surveiling the entire population becomes prohibitively expensive, but it doesn't prevent targeted operations on an individual by determined state actors. Having multiple options for those apps is a good thing, even if the apps are individually imperfect, because the government will have to deal with multiple apps instead of one, and that takes more resources.

As for the rest of your comment, those claims aren't true, at least not in the way you stated. DOGE has been accused of mishandling sensitive records, and that part might be true, but I've not seen any evidence pointing towards the mishandling being a part of a evil plot to strengthen the surveillance state and promote fascism. Mass surveillance was already a problem back in 2013 when Snowden leaked it. In fact, it was already a problem before Obama's first term, and Snowden held off on leaking it because he thought Obama would introduce reforms, which didn't happen. The surveillance state is not a recent fascist movement spearheaded by Musk or DOGE. And I think a lot of the vitriol towards Musk is manufactured. He occasionally lies and is prone to manipulation like everyone else, but he's not the supervillain you think he is.

https://obdev.at/blog/little-snitch-for-linux/

The core issue is simple and uncomfortable: through automatic updates, a vendor can run any code, with any privileges, on your machine, at any time.

-----

If the author is serious about this, then they should make their own program completely open source, and make builds bit-for-bit reproducible.

For all I know, the proprietary Little Snitch daemon, or even the binaries they're distributing for the open source components, contain backdoors that can be remotely activated to run any code, with any privileges, on your machine, at any time.

Right now, physical ID is only required for government services, for the most part. But digital signatures can be extended later to gate all services and purchases, both online and physical, including non-government ones. For example, you can't host a website without a gov approved signature for each website.

Under a system like that, you would rarely find out when the gov refuses to issue a signature, or when any kind of injustice happens, really. Websites where people can talk about bad things happening to them will simply be denied a signature to legally operate, so they're given the ultimatum to "voluntarily" censor posts, or be shut down. It becomes impossible to have this very conversation on a public platform with any kind of meaningful reach. And they already have this kind of system in China, since you brought it up. In fact, they have domestic surveillance systems that make the Snowden disclosures look cute.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden#Revelations

The existence of eIDAS itself is already a big problem. They're going to try to gradually push laws to make it so that you'll need a government issued signature to do anything. That's when they'll have total power over you because they can simply refuse to issue.

Modern computing and communications technologies can be leveraged to build infinitely stable authoritarian regimes. It's even possible for democracies to stumble into it on their own as they attempt to regulate these new technologies. In hindsight, the Internet was built wrong. It has a top-down structure which all of human civilization is beginning to mirror.

They're a part of the corp-gov surveillance complex [0]. This is the real threat behind the age verification push. The feds already have mass surveillance capabilities in iOS and macOS, and even Windows and most Android distros, but not on most open-source Linux distros, so they're starting to force it legally in the open. They're desperate because Linux is about to outcompete the enshittified Windows on desktops.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden#Revelations

There are some useful ideas from SoftEtherVPN, BitTorrent, Yggdrasil Network, and Tor you could borrow, if you're looking to improve this. The ideal tunneling solution, which doesn't exist yet, is one that not only evades DPI, but also onion bounces you through nodes in a decentralized ad hoc network, and does automatic node discovery.