You have never had a job before, huh?

This is an extremely reactionary take.

How the fuck is this Reactionary?

I recognize a threat and I want to avoid my child being exploited.

At one point in history, the car was a new form of technology growing in popularity, and we eventually agreed that kids shouldn’t drive.

I think we actually agree, maybe just a misunderstanding.

I don’t believe that parental controls actually stop most kids from doing things they shouldn’t, and I think these devices are bad for a growing mind compared to real world human experiences.

I think I misunderstood you earlier thinking you said that smartphones were easier to agree to giving children over a VR headset, because a VR headset is only for gaming. I think we both agree that they are bad.

That’s not my point. Kids congregate in public worlds, and predatory adults know where to find them.

If anyone in the future ends up going to prison or losing custody of their children because they bought them a cellphone or let them use social media, we will have officially failed as a society.

I agree entirely, but do you have a response to what I said.

It is not the government’s place to parent people’s children for them, much less the dysfunctional government we have.

If you let a pedophile into your house, and let them rape your children, you shouldn’t be allowed to have children. If it happens digitally on your watch because you didn’t police your child’s access to the Internet like it actually matters, you were a bad parent.

Last time I checked, minors are orders of magnitude less likely to be smokers or drinkers than adults. Seems like the current laws we have for age-restricting things do, in fact, work.

The rate of marijuana use went up in recreationally legal states, while the rate of marijuana use amongst minors went down, because dispensaries enforce minimum age laws that dealers don’t.

The current laws allowing 13 year olds to sign a the TOS for a social media site need to be raised to match every other expectation of consent under contract law: 18 years old. For everyone saying that the parents are the ones that are supposed to be responsible, make them sign the TOS for their kids accounts, and then throw the book at them when they fail to protect their kids.

You can buy an Android Tracphone on Amazon for $25: https://a.co/d/5Xb3DqX

You can buy an unlocked Android phone for $44: https://a.co/d/0hTu3Me

I think that this is somewhat besides the point. Give a smartphone to a teenager, and block all social media, and one of two things is going to happen:

1. They don’t use the phone, because the only reason they wanted it was social media.
2. They find a way around your social media block, because the only reason they wanted it was social media.

Dancing, rock and roll, tv, video games, and now phones. Every time, everyone thinks this time is different and every time it hasn’t been.

• Dancing (with other children at dances)
• Rock and Roll (just listening to it)
• TV (just watching it, and maybe seeing objectionable content)
• Video Games (Addiction / Inappropriate content)
• Internet-connected camera-equipped smartphones (Direct access to scammers, bullies, and child pornographers)

One of these things is not like the other.

I don’t follow. Wouldn’t a limited-purpose device be easier to restrict than a general-purpose device?

Look at the Nintendo Switch. If there was ever an Internet-connected device to give your kids, it’s a Switch. I have never heard of anything untoward happening to a child on Nintendo’s online platform.

The first (and only) time I played VRChat, my takeaway was, “What kind of adult would want to play a game with this many preteens in every room?”

Then I answered my own question…

The problem here is that the systems you have to monitor usage aren’t great, and kids are known for lying or omitting details to their parents.

Giving kids open-ended access to technology doesn’t have to involve giving them access to the Internet without constant guidance. I would rather my kid have less digital access than their peers, than get sexually exploited because they were a child publicly online.

More and more I am seeing that the places kids go online are places I don’t fully understand, but a cursory review reveals is also a hotspot for sexual predators. This seems like the perfect place for a predator to stalk my child. I don’t know enough to stop them, and my kid doesn’t know enough not to get exploited. By the time I find out about it, it’ll probably be too late.

Giving a child an internet-connected camera and screen can become such a horrific nightmare, I think that good parenting actually has to involve being realistic and telling your kids “just because your friends have TikTok and Instagram doesn’t mean you won’t get grounded for it in this house”, and letting kids use technology when I am in the room with them. I have seen what kids are posting online, and it’s easy to assume that their parents don’t care, but it’s a lot more realistic to accept that kids are good at keeping secrets, and their parents don’t know what they’re up to.

If they want to learn about computers on their own, I’ll buy them what they need to learn about all sorts of stuff that doesn’t expose them directly to capitalist or sexual exploitation online. When they are old enough to defend themselves, then they can be given the trust in accessing the Internet on their own, but until then they need to explore under my watchful eye.

Giving a smartphone to a <10 year old child, and trusting that the limited monitoring tools available, and your child’s honesty is enough to keep them safe from vicious exploitation is delusional and irresponsible.

Think of it this way - what if the government said one day: “All child porn made in the before this date is legal, all child porn made after this date is illegal”.

You would end up with a huge corpus of “legal” child porn that pedophiles could use as a release, but you could become draconian about the manufacture of new child porn. This would, theoretically, discourage new child porn from being created, because the risk is too high compared to the legal stuff.

Can you see the problem? That’s right, in this scenario, child porn is legal. That’s fucked up, and we shouldn’t do that, even if it is “simulated”, because fuck that.

There are literally mountains of evidence that suggest that normalizing child abuse in any fashion increases the rate at which children are actually abused, but it never stops there from being a highly upvoted comment suggesting that jacking it to simulated kids is some how a “release valve” for actual pedophilia, which makes absolutely no fucking sense given everything we know about human sexuality.

If this concept were true, hentai fans would likely be some of the most sexually well-adjusted people around, having tons of experience releasing their real-world sexual desires via a virtual medium. Instead, we find that these people objectify the living shit out of women, because they’ve adopted an insanely overidealized caricature of what a woman should look and act like that is completely divorced from reality.

It’s not really children on these pics.

You are certain about this? If so, where are you getting that info, because it’s not in the article?

Generative image models frequently are used for the “infill” capabilities, which is how nudifying apps work.

If he was nudifying pictures of real kids, the nudity may be simulated, but the children are absolutely real, and should be considered victims of child pornography.

I’m not defending child porn with this comment.

This is one of those cases where, even if you’re technically correct, you probably shouldn’t say out loud how you personally would get away with manufacturing child porn, because it puts people in the position of imagining you manufacturing child porn.

You don’t regulate the metadata, you regulate its trade as a financial security.

But you knew that, you’re just being obtuse.

TIL that Shia LeBeouf is an abuser. I’m wouldn’t have known about it if it weren’t for this movie. Good job Coppola, your movie is basically a roster of people to cancel. Them all starring in a flop movie together is just kinda funny when you think about it.

If pieces of art metadata are being traded like securities, then yes, the SEC should regulate their trade.

It should have absolutely nothing to do with the “art” associated with that metadata, it should just be regulated for what it is.

You’re not getting what I’m saying, because you don’t understand what “proprietary” means in this context.

Proprietary encryption ≠ Proprietary code.

You can roll your own shitty novel encryption algorithm and license it under GPL if you want, it’s still proprietary encryption in that Signal has its own unvetted encryption algorithm instead of using a trusted existing algorithm.

EDIT: How are people not understanding this?

Proprietary licensing is different from a proprietary way of doing things.

If you folks think that a GitHub repo and GPL license are all you need to vet an encryption algorithm, and you think that absolves an novel untested algo from being called “proprietary encryption” you’re gonna get burned one day because your trust was built on not understanding encryption.

Signal built their own encryption algorithm. That’s proprietary encryption. If you still think I’m wrong, pick up a dictionary, look up “proprietary” and “encryption”, and you might just have a chance at understanding that “proprietary” is an adjective that can apply to a lot of different words.