Technology

The reason is that we all live in capitalist dictatorships masquerading as "democracy", and are rapidly approaching a time when climate change, wealth inequality, and automation will see widespread revolt of the proles, so the ruling class is tightening its grip, and going all in on fascism.

If a government says they’re doing something “for the children” or “to fight terrorism”, it’s neither of those things - it’s for control. Those are just the go-to reasons they use to push them through because they can push the narrative that anyone against it supports terrorism/child abuse.

It's really simple.

The western democracies want to create a universal digital ID wallet and have that be required to access any site.

There are a lot of reasons they could want this. For example, there are probably tens of millions of fake accounts controlled by adversarial nations which are used to sow extremism and disinformation online. It is impossible for counterintelligence to detect these at scale. We can see the corrosive effects that social media is having on society, there are countries actively working to make the problem worse but we have no tools to stop them.

This is also why there is a big push to limit children from accessing social media. They're often the targets for these campaigns because they're easily manipulated and have a lot of free time to spread the misinformation once they're indoctrinated.

I don't think a digital ID is the way to solve this problem. But, we're not being asked or informed about why it is happening. They're, instead, trying to ram these measures through using moral panic about children so anybody opposing them is easily dismissed as "not caring about The Children" or "supporting sex trafficking/pedophiles/predators".

I understand the situation, but they're trying to go around the democratic process by not talking about the problems.

With regards to this most people are just ignoring the law. VPN use has gone through the roof.

They also get arrested for peaceful protests and stay silent: https://www.npr.org/2025/08/11/nx-s1-5498378/uk-police-say-more-than-500-people-arrested-in-pro-palestinian-events-over-weekend

We used to know, even in the face of state atrocities: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterloo_Massacre https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffragette_bombing_and_arson_campaign https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984%E2%80%931985_United_Kingdom_miners%2527_strike

Sadly, Thatcher broke the miners and we’ve never been right since.

There has been a petition. And it has received the aforementioned "lol no" response. The thing is though after the French set the capital on fire the age of retirement still went up, nothing changed.

Anyway, all we have to do is use a VPN to get around it and wait for the inevitable data leak, then the whole thing will collapse under the weight of its own stupidity.

the brits really need to learn from the french how to protest

Where were all the protests to this: https://techinformed.com/france-enforces-age-verification-law-adult-sites/ ?

This is what you get at the moment when you access pornhub from a French IP:

https://github.com/yggdrasil-network https://yggdrasil-openwrt.github.io/openwrt-config-basic.html

Something similar when using an operating system from Google and Apple, known for their attachment to privacy and noble behavior?

In any case, you can't have a mesh with ends reachable at all times or even addressed. Delay-tolerant applications are sort of better. With nodes synchronizing when in contact. Except for, say, threaded discussions to make sense, this would almost require some sort of dependency management, to synchronize objects by priority.

But honestly all of today's computing seems authoritarian and imperial. Which leads to the way it shapes the world. Richard Stallman is known for being worried about this (not many other people), but GNU + Hurd is honestly still in the same paradigm.

I wonder if it's possible to devise something like BTRON, except with program objects being similar to Java assemblies, but at the same time more like Common Lisp. For the commonly used software to be generally easily hackable\changeable. BTRON in its concept is nicer than Unix, it's a consistent idea for modernity of computing, one can say. It seems even nicer than Plan 9. Unfortunately I don't know Japanese to play with it.

Something that could be used on weak and cheap enough hardware to have some separate niche of personal\PDA computing based on it. Like Briar, but.

Things like CJDNS and Yggdrasil surely look nice, but those just change one layer. For a real totalitarian world they won't help. It's not even a matter of technology, it's a matter of links' capability when you can't use the Internet because, ahem, you'll be detected and police will come knocking.

A digital ID, by itself, isn't much of an issue and can be very convenient for the user as well. Even better, it can be setup in a more privacy conserving way. For instance, when you have to provide your ID today, you often have to give companies a copy of your ID, which isn't really favorable to the owner of that ID. With digital ID, it's easier to give/revoke access to your ID or mask certain information the other party doesn't need to know. Most ID scans are mainly done to verify the person has a legitimate ID anyways and presented it, making this digital can be an improvement.

Where it does get black mirror-ey is when you have to use that digital identity to basically log in to the internet and all your internet activity is logged to your ID. The shit the government can pull with such information is mindbogglingly bad.

relevant maybe

We don’t want this dystopian nightmare either, and just like Brexit we weren’t told what it was before it was too late. Hopefully you will welcome us back when all the liars are voted out and ignored.

EU isn't much better.

If you go to chatcontrol.eu you will find more info about chat control and how to fight against it.

Email your MEPs, push back on the narrative that it protects children. IF it even did protect children it would be at the cost of any semblamce of privacy. Politicians are also exempt despite a pedo politician leading a major world power right now.

I got an immediate response explaining their stance is based almost entirely around the disemination of csam.

It is a noble goal but akin to ending traffic deaths by mandating getting and checking the coast is clear every 10 meters.