- The internet, as it was before the one-way ratchet started to close, feels more and more like a lightning in a bottle that nobody in power wants repeating ever again. Everything in the past couple years has been going towards the centralization into a small number of services, walled wastelands that require you forfeit any kind of anonymity to even browse, tightly coupled to the countries they operate in, and especially for tech corpos, practically an extension of surveillance agencies through PRISMesque programs.
Soon enough (and already the case, if you're one of the unlucky ones) you won't even be able to browse it without explicitly allowing Google to track you on every single website you try to access through your Google-approved, constantly monitored handheld device, linked directly to your identity.
Commercial VPNs are not a solution, they're merely kicking the can down the road, and shrinking the number of people that will complain once they will, finally, come for them too, first by requiring strict accountability to providers and age verification, then outright banning any that do not comply.
- Spoiler alert : Singapore won the race years ago. Cameras everywhere, and mostly : the singaporian civilian population is educated to surveil peers so that they don't commit incivilities. Here is an article about it : https://gcctvms.com/smart-city-surveillance-singapore-camera...
- I’d rather live in Singapore any day than US. I actually think a bit of surveillance and law enforcement is necessary. People in US think they can do whatever they want with no repercussions because “that’s their God given right”. Look at all the garbage in their streets. Try telling someone in US that they parked on 2 spots and see how quickly you get punched in the face. And so on. I’d rather have cameras and strict law enforcement than everyone thinking they can do whatever they want. I lived in Singapore and it was wonderful. Very safe and clean, could walk alone in the middle of the night with zero worries.
- Why are you not living there anymore? I understand the trade-offs, but I hate the feeling of constant surveillance. And knowing that I'm a minority in this subject, I'm aware that I'm probably going to be at the loser side in this battle. However, I'm still sad thinking that I could be a criminal in the future by being naked at my own house.
- This assumes your government, or whoever is monitoring and handling said surveillance info, is doing so with good intentions and adequate security/privacy.
For some, that level of trust is unobtainable.
- I need a list of countries not to visit.
So far I have UK, China, Singapore.
But maybe I should accept less rights when traveling.
- Why UK?
- Too many cameras and not enough food.
- All the ones that force you to give up passwords would be on many peoples' list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_disclosure_law?lang=en
Ireland... I'm disappointed.
- reddit started asking KYC yesterday.
You (and me) can bitch all you want, but reddit has well prepared for us whining and being sad will change nothing.
Mark my words: KYC will be required on HN in about two years. Not because dang will want it, but because that's the direction the world is going to.
- Maybe dang doesn't want it, but his boss definitely wants it.
Garry Tan, president & CEO of YC, on Flock support: "You're thinking Chinese surveillance US-based surveillance helps victims and prevents more victims" [1]
The tech/VC people want it, because that's where the money will be.
- "Anthropic to require age verification via Persona" [1]
Oh Persona is also used on Reddit [2].
Persona.
A YC backed company.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48628264
[2] https://help.withpersona.com/articles/7F6BaF9h8Fxf0XWkwQscXN...
- A Vibes backed company too, it seems.[1]
[1] https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2026/02/age-verificat...
- Right, it's dystopian if they do it, but utopian if we do. If anything I'd trust Chinese surveillance more. It's accountable to the government not the whims of profit motive and private individuals.
- > us whining and being sad will change nothing
For me, ditching Reddit was what changed.
- Yeah... I have been reading threads upon threads of normies who discussed how to take better pictures of their passports to submit to Persona in order to keep using reddit.
We are clearly the minority and reddit is happy to pay the price of us leaving the platform.
- Reddit doesn't want to ask for KYC, they are required by law.
Use a VPN, perhaps Mullvad or IVPN to appear to sites as if you are from a freer country (or state) to bypass the KYC.
- > they are required by law
Yes I understand. They are better prepared to fight the surveillance state than I am. And yet they caved in instead of putting out some resistance.
- It's weird because... I'm not the customer on either Reddit or HN. I'm the product.
- You can become a customer on reddit by purchasing subscription. I did. I like reddit.
Doesn't matter. They want your passport.
- This is like saying you are the customer when you buy branded goods when in essence you are just paying to advertise the product for them.
Very weird world we live in!
- Reddit doesn’t even have my email. No way in hell will they get any real identification.
- You realize people are uploading their docs to reddit by the millions, right?
- What do you mean? You do realize that "those" people have little to nothing to do with proper people, right?
Of course people are deficient by the billions.
- And that means that largely nobody cares about us with our opinion.
Internet WILL be completely KYCed and very soon. That's kind of inevitable.
- > will be required on HN in about
We moved here because it was the best place available: we'd move elsewhere in case this place will not be available.
- Nah. HN users just like the rest of the normies will happily oblige and upload their passports.
It's just that a small minority will continue to protect child abuse^W^W^Wresist utopia.
- Governments are casting a wide a net but it all seems aimed at a foreign influence and espionage Cold War going on. The thought of using this for crime in most countries is tertiary and the real reasons for implementing these systems are so embarrassing to their respective governments that they will rarely mention what's actually going. In Canada there has been two recently large omissions, one is the Chinese government influencing Canadian elections and the other was Indian spies killing Indian immigrants on Canadian soil. Maybe this will all result in mission creep, but the upside will be getting to pay for things with your face.
- America, however, is definitely trying to tear down the wall between domestric and foreign surveillance.
- VPNs are great and all but many that are well advertised here in North America are a huge source of attacks, abuse, etc. so it’s pretty desirable just to block them. They sometimes have agreements with residential ISPs to get around the bans.
- The largest provider of residential ISP, BrightData, has installed them on smart TVs made by Samsung and LG, millions of them, unknown to the people who purchase and use the TVs.
- [dead]
- I've very sympathetic to this message, but "not even the Pentagon’s employees can expect to have their privacy respected" doesn't make sense. When you sign up, you sign up to hand everything over, including your private life.
- Why did so many countries all start trying to do this at once?
- Britain will win for sure.
- The interesting question is whether non-Western countries will develop their own internet governance models that are neither US-dominated nor China-firewall style. The .ng ccTLD (Nigeria) is a real, functional namespace that offers an alternative to .com. The internet was supposed to be distributed. Maybe the future is genuinely distributed governance, not a single blocs approach.
- If you're not fabricating your own silicon, you are OWNED.
- Lock in, that's not true.
https://xcancel.com/GrapheneOS/search?f=tweets&q=Backdoor&si...
- What point are you trying to make? Its not obvious from the link.
- long video, but... https://youtu.be/jmTwlEh8L7g
the presenter now works at intel.
- This is very unwelcome.
- sure, I'll just right on your service, with the ability to see and sell everything I do...
- VPNs shift trust from your ISP to the VPN provider.
I trust Mullvad 100x more than my ISP, so it's a good decision to use Mullvad and it benefits my privacy.
It's not like your ISP or Mullvad can see content of sites, either they can just see the DNS requests.
What ISP sees without a VPN: news.YCombinator.com, apple.com, Wikipedia.com
What ISP sees with a VPN: Mullvad server
What VPN sees when you use it: news.YCombinator.com, apple.com, Wikipedia.com
- You also need to trust the root certificates that they don't give key access to the VPN or ISP
- Note that depending on how you're using your VPN you need to explicitly set it for DNS queries to be made over the VPN
- The country that really refined mass surveillance in the digital age, China, has seen tons of investment from people who want to see big returns and for the workers to be kept in line (by force if necessary) and many countries want that sort of "prosperity" for themselves, which means sucking up to the investor class, which includes people like Peter Thiel and Larry Ellison.
If you do business with totalitarian states, there's a good chance you become one.
- We're #1!
- That’s why I said it before, only delusionals think we live in democracy, there’s no democracy, no freedom, no transparency, none of the values you hear daily are actually in use, it’s just a facade to trick people and maybe to make them relax their measures to maintain their own privacy compared to non democratic ones. In fact, it’s better to be straightforward and be oppressive where people might fed up and revolt at some point rather than those sneaky tactics, coupled by making people lives very expensive to live where “privacy” becomes an auxiliary commodity, plus giving the public some distraction like concerts and other carrots after all that whipping.
It’s very accurate to assume that ALL US based tech companies are part of mass surveillance, no matter what promises you hear, companies can be forced to cooperate without the public knowledge. Same with European ones, as the article stated, they are not that far, so don’t assume much even when you see the cliche “based in Switzerland!! Trust us give us your money”. The only safe way is to host your own, maintain your own, encrypt at rest and while transferring on your own, trust no one and nothing, and it’s a good start.
- [dead]
- It is from a VPN Company, so YMMV. But I do agree there is surveillance happening, but the amount of data is way too much to fully examine. Makes one wonder if this is one of the reasons the US Gov. (and others) are so into AI.
- mullvad has been one of the good ones.
- >It is from a VPN Company, so YMMV.
mullvad has one of the best, if not the best, track records when it comes to vpns over its nearly 2 decades of being in business. it feels wrong to lump them under the same "a VPN Company" label with the likes of Hola VPN or whatever, despite it being technically true.
- It's just a matter of time until police will ask their digital avatar of you if you're becoming a problem, how your week and month and year has been, what you're up to next week.
- You don’t need to wonder, it’s a fact that the interest and investment in AI is primarily driven by the ability to mass surveillance and other mass XYZ.
In Canada, they straight up tell you that the AI will be used to profile you, from every transaction you do all the way to analyzing your sentiment
> AI could analyze public sentiment on social media and other platforms to gauge public opinion.
https://www.canada.ca/en/government/system/digital-governmen...
Brace yourself!
- Mass surveillance is bad, until I'm in charge of it. -- Parents demanding "age verification" laws
- >Parents demanding "age verification" laws
I keep seeing this claim, but where is it coming from?
- I think part of it has been that parents have been sold the 'only way' is age verification laws. As part of being a parent you're responsible for what your child does, even online. But monitoring everything they do is nearly impossible as kids are pretty sharp and will find that friend whos parents let them do anything and use their electronic devices. This presents itself as a 'valid' solution for the type of people that don't think about the ramifications of it. I mean, we have to have ID to buy cigs and alcohol and numerous other things, so why would this be bad?
- This parent wants a form of that that doesn't require identity disclosure. Like zero trust assertions. Without that, the risks are too high.
- Just talk to an average person rather than a tech nerd.
- I don't think asking the average person whether they would consent to constantly have their face scanned to access the Internet would yield the result you believe it would, no matter the excuse.
"parents" are not do-I-look-like-I-know-what-a-jay-peg-is boomers you and others who make this claim believe them to be. the people who are having children now grew up with iPhones. to them, the Internet is not that newfangled thang they heard about on CNN/Fox.
so, show me the data. not a poll with vague ass questions like "are you concerned about your children's safety on the Internet?". I want to see the percentage of people who answer yes to an unambiguous question like "do you consent to submit your ID and/or scan your face to access any random website ~~to fight terrorisds~~ ~~to protect our democracy~~ to protect your children?"
- "Won't somebody think of the children" is as old as time and works. That's why it's used so often. If it were ineffective at convincing people to give up their rights, it wouldn't be a thing.
- and what I'm saying is that I'm not seeing the data to back up that claim.
California, for example, has all those propositions they vote on, about various things they're allowed to decide. the recent age verification bullshit, however, doesn't seem to have been put up to a vote.
- It's not parents demanding 'age verification' laws.
- That's not supported by the polling.
>From everything you have seen and heard, do you support or oppose the recent rules requiring age verification to access websites that may contain pornographic material?*
>80% support
https://yougov.com/en-gb/articles/52693-how-have-britons-rea...
>The Essential poll found majority support for a range reforms to improve online safety including: [...] enforcing age verifications for pornography and gambling sites (79%); enforcing age verification for social media (76%)
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/may/...
- it really difficult to take this polling at face value. average people typically hear only one side of the argument: "age verification will stop kids from accessing harmful sites".
they don't hear about all of the potential downsides, knock-on effects, chilling effects, etc. unless they are part of niche groups like HN. and even if they do, in passing, they often lack the technical knowledge to really understand the implications.
i.e., they are consenting, but it isn't informed consent.
i imagine there would be an interesting picture if these numbers were presented in buckets by occupation, or by results in tech competency test, etc.
(similarly, as an example, my opinion in a poll about some complex medical procedure would not be very informed. i would be relying solely on what i hear on the news or read in a quick article, with no fundamentals to really assess and form an opinion of my own)
- This is a problem with current implementations of democracy. It's free elections, but it's not informed elections. The average voter has very little clue about what they are voting for. Arguably it's impossible to know in a representative democracy.
Not that I know how to do it better, but it's definitely an issue, possibly one that could be solved somehow.
- There was no option to select no!
Only which age you wanted the ban to start
- Support is not the same thing as demand.
- That just seems like a cheap way to wriggle out of any inconvenient poll numbers. Most people support access to abortion? Well how many people actually demand it? Most people support medicare for all? Well how many people actually demand it?
- [dead]
- Are you quoting the same polls that simply didn't offer respondents any way to say "I'm against all of it"?
Dishonest polls do not demonstrate popular support.
https://consumerrights.wiki/w/User:Louis/Manufacturing_suppo...
- >Are you quoting the same polls that simply didn't offer respondents any way to say "I'm against all of it"?
- This feels a bit out of touch. These policies have a lot of public support here in the UK. All of our parent friends are lauding it despite my complaints.
- What story are they telling them self to justify this?
- By ignoring key implementation details. That's what has been happening in Romania with this topic for the last year.
Constant polling and reporting of opinion, and always phrased in terms of effect instead of how they aim to do so.
Once properly informed "do you want to go through an ID check on all websites and apps that you use?" people wise up quickly to the issue. But state sponsored media is pretty adamant about moving this topic forward.
- You sure about that? The average person couldn't care less about privacy and would gladly hand over a significant amount of data to whatever company asks. The sentiment on hacker news isn't the norm.
- Yes, I really want pedophiles to know just how old my kids are.
- lol as if they don’t have a birth certificate already
- - does anyone have actual proof that surveillance does not effectively curb terrorism or something along those lines?
- i keep seeing the same arguments everywhere "ThEy WaNt To CoNtRoL Us" etc
- how do you propose catching terrorists then?
- What's so wrong about expecting police to get warrants and do police work legally and aboveboard? If Law Enforcement doesn't follow the law, how can we trust them to impartially investigate and enforce it? Giving more power to unaccountable groups with a well-documented and lengthy history of malfeasance is just a bad idea, we should be reforming and abolishing these institutions to create a transparent and just legal system in line with the liberal democratic principles that underly our whole civilization rather than the type of surveillance state most associated with totalitarian regimes that terrorize their own people.
- The funny thing is that quite often people who actually perform attacks are well known to the security services ( because they have been frequently referred to them - rather than some online trawl ).
cf UK manchester bombers.
In the end the only effective way to stop terrorism ( since it's so easy to just drive a car into a crowd of people ), is to create a society where people don't want to do it - which is what we mostly have - as terrorism, while terrible, is fortunately still quite rare.
- This is a classic logical error.
It is not the job of the citizenry to prove that surveillance doesn't curb terrorism in order to preserve privacy. It is the job of the government to prove that surveillance DOES curb terrorism to such a degree that privacy MUST be degraded.
Only then we can have a conversation.
- but has there ever been a study conducted like say on arxiv or something that tells you what or what is not achieved by surveillance?
- There's not even that much terrorism and there wasn't much even before these authoritarian measures.
More people die in the US from cars every month than died from 9/11.
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
Yes, who cares what it originally meant:
https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famou...
- Of course it curbs terrorism. But it's not worth it. Think of everything that improved when the Taliban came into power. Crime went down. Public services improved. It wasn't worth it.
The cure you propose is worse than the disease. I don't want you to prevent me from stubbing my toe by cutting my foot off. You're just going to have to find another way and do the best you can under those constraints.
- I really can't believe there are people that still think this is about terrorism in 2026, at least not on HN
- How much of this is actually to "catch" terrorists? Its mostly for surveillance, intimidation, suppression. Usually it's the state that defines who a terrorist is, and usually terrorists are ALL people opposing the current regime.
- Case in point - in the UK you can currently be put into prison for a long stretch under terrorism charges for holding up a sign with just 4 words.
- Last I checked River->Sea is 6 words. Unless it's a phrase about a different subject, but I can't imagine since the UK only tends to arrest sign holders as part of protecting Bibi's interests.
- The four words you're referring to are "I support Palestine Action", and there's nobody in prison "for a long stretch" just for saying that.
There have been over 3000 people arrested for showing support for this proscribed organisation, and over 700 charged, but none actually prosecuted yet. It was only just decided two weeks ago that the government's act of proscribing Palestine Action was lawful.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/jun/15/arrested-pro...
Obviously, I think the Terrorism Act shouldn't silence speech like it does. Palestine Action are a pack of bumbling thugs, and the government's real reason for proscription is that those idiots successfully broke into an RAF base. Egg on face for military so government strikes back with proscription.
The law does allow for these sorts of penalties you describe. But I think you will find that if the CPS does prosecute these cases, especially against people who literally stood in front of police stations and displayed those four words and no more, i.e. they dared the government to prosecute them for speech, I don't think they will be "put in prison for a long stretch". They may not even be prosecuted at all. They would have to do more, i.e. actually break into places and physically damage them, like Palestine Action have repeatedly done, to get a long prison sentence. But the threat of prison for speech is there in the law, that's why I don't like that law.
- You shouldn't be judged based on your speech, only your actions. That's the problem with the Terrorism Act.
- >how do you propose catching terrorists then
how did police ever do anything over the past hundreds of years?
- the terrorists are using signal messenger, in game chat messages and all sorts of sophisticated tooling, they are literally getting trained by it. how do you propose beating someone tech savy without using tech?
- >how do you propose beating someone tech savy without using tech?
no one said "without using tech".
- "Terrorists" are by far the least likely to cause me a problem directly in the US. I'm more likely to die by police or be imprisoned by the State than I am to die in a terrorist attack.
- In front of the loss of Anonimity (the prospected loss of Dignity), "safety" has utterly no importance. You do not trade Dignity for "safety".
- Says a coward posting anonymously online.
- you are gonna start attacking a person for asking a reasonable question? i have been very active on HN for a long time now
- Don’t bother, probably a paid actor or bot.
266 points by Cider9986 4 hours ago | 102 comments