Glad to see more platforms on the Fediverse. Couldn’t be less interested in this particular one since it’s short form video. Those who like this medium: enjoy.
I may find short form video distasteful, but it’s less distasteful than those who want to dictate the media formats that others consume. Get a grip, people.
When I was a kid, most families that had a computer kept it in a common area. Same with the TV, for that matter.
Some families did not. Mine did not! But that was a decision that was up to individual families.
I don’t see why these decisions should be up to anyone but individual families. Period. If your kids are mature enough for unsupervised computer use, or if you don’t see it as a problem, that’s up to you as a parent. Same as if you feel comfortable taking your kids skeet shooting or rock climbing.
I can't speak for other parents, but some standards for parental controls—the presence of which and adherence to might be enforced by law, if need be, and need probably would be since none of this is stuff vendors couldn't have figured out on their own long ago if they cared to—we could leverage would be goddamn nice and is all I'd really want.
Especially as devices get more locked-down and it becomes hard to control stuff at the network level if you don't have root on the devices themselves, like... man, it's such a time-suck, and I'm 100% sure I'd be having to choose between "I guess we just don't have the Internet in this house" and "fuck it, I give up, go stumble on gore videos I guess" if I weren't a lot better at this stuff than the median parent. I feel for them, this stuff is entirely hopeless for 'em.
Like, my kids have Chromebooks from school. They pretty much have to bring them home. So now I have this extra physical item I can't administrate that I must police at night if I don't want them to stay up all night on trash-tier web games or something. So I'll block the devices at the network level at night, right? Easy fix! Nope, the fucking things rotate MAC addresses as an anti-tracking measure I guess. We have zero need for that feature (the number of times they're gonna use the things outside school and home over their whole school careers is going to be very small) but I'm not admin on those devices, so, stuck with it. So there's an extra hurdle to making that happen.
Repeat some other incredible frustration for every single thing. Oh look, AppleTV has a simple rating interface so I can at least make sure nothing too bad can get through if I mess something up. Great. Oh except almost nothing on the device except Apple's own software respects the setting, at all, just ignores it. You have to go dick around with every single service on there to lock them down, then hope it sticks through updates and other nonsense. Awesome, great feature that's actually totally useless because nobody cares about the users. Sigh.
Your options are go full-luddite, give up and leave them to the Internet gods, or take on this load of work and stress that our parents did not have.
I agree that it should be easier. We’re on a frigging VC website. Shouldn’t there be a huge market opportunity here for parental control systems? Why is this not a problem that anyone is going after?
I’m also surprised that “family monitoring” stalkerware companies like Life360 haven’t expanded into this market.
You have to make everyone abide by them, for it to not-suck. At a minimum, software and service providers would have to respect settings client agents tell them they have (as in the AppleTV case, it's bordering on pointless for platforms to even have them if most vendors ignore them)
That'd probably be enough (plus something for school devices in particular to let parents set stricter settings during non-school hours, without having full admin rights on the devices) to do a ton of good, but it's not a startup, it's a protocol and maybe a law.
The startup version would probably try to capture that as some kind of one-stop-shop web portal.
I would think that as a platform like this grows, they would be able to build relationships with OS and service vendors to manage parental control settings via API. After all, this would take a lot of public pressure off of the individual vendors, especially for social/gaming/media platforms.
>Shouldn’t there be a huge market opportunity here for parental control systems
Requires parents to be invested and unlike the OP (appreciate you btw) many parents are not.
No money/use in it unless people actually care enough to invest personal effort into it (which they don't, hence forcing solutions that fuck everybody over, like UK requiring id for adult websites).
When I was a kid 5 gigantic companies didn’t basically control the whole internet.
Skeet shooting isn’t in every pocket, school, library, Best Buy kiosk. Etc. Maybe if the phones were open source and I truly had the capability to control access this would make sense but the currently available tools are obviously toothless in a way meant to ensure that your u feel like your in control.
I’m not really scared about what my kids might do or see. If the internet was still countercultural and not everything was fucking force fed to you by gigantic billionaire mega corps it would be fine. But there should be some friction.
Because they are harmful. The worry is not online use, but online addiction. We don't just allow parents to regulate what drugs their children consume (medicinal), we trust medical practitioners for the correct dosage. Similarly, social media regulation should be done to achieve the same effect.
The failings of individual families have far reaching consequences beyond their own homes, especially in non collectivist societies that mostly put themselves above all others.
Yes, it has caused major issues all across Spain, including interference with emergency services, but apparently the owner of the league has deep political connections or something. It’s also likely that the political class sees this as laying the groundwork for future censorship efforts, given their track record.
The permacomputing community aren’t quite preppers, although there is some overlap in interests with that community. Preppers are usually concerned about one or more possible disasters and think that with the right gear they can survive the big war, the solar flare, whatever. Permacomputing is a mix of people who think we are already doomed due to climate change, concerned people who think we aren’t yet doomed and want to help/lead by example with simpler tech, and tech minimalists who aren’t worried about doom and who find the projects congruent with their desire for a simpler lifestyle.
I was simply commenting on the Collapse page[1] that was mentioned by gp - not the larger permacumputing community. The collapse page[1] is pure nerd-prepper material - I say this a subscriber to r/DataHoarder with a Kiwix SBC in my go-bag; I know my people. I also am self-aware enough to realize this fantasy is in line with XKCD #208[2].
Anyone that is in the US that is seriously modeling an infrastructural collapse scenario (not a brief period of unavailability), has to consider what that entails: that the federal, state and local governments have failed. If that happens, you'll have much bigger, and more fundamental problems to tackle.
Thanks for the clarification, I misunderstood what you were referring to. Still I will mirror what the sibling commenter said. I do think there is a fundamental difference between traditional tacticool gear “preppers” who dream of fighting “zombies” (a metaphor for hungry hordes of people) and those who want to help their community be more resilient in the face of danger. I also think that small scale disaster readiness is a normal and responsible thing to do; I’ve personally been helped by it in the past!
Calling that collapse page “nerd-prepper material” is a bit reductionist; there's very clearly a solarpunk/left-libertarian bent to it (even ignoring the broader context of the rest of the site) that contrasts pretty starkly with the typical prepper “my house is my castle” right-propertarian mentality. The prepper seeks to survive and rule over the ashes, assuming the throne of the same legacy socioeconomic systems that produced the collapse in the first place; the solarpunk seeks to survive and build something better than ashes, learning from the mistakes of those legacy socioeconomic systems and hopefully preventing history from repeating itself. The prepper centers on the individual, or maybe one's family; the solarpunk centers on the community.
Being a prepper doesn't require any specific political alignment, just the strongly held belief in an impending, civilizational catastrophe and the requisite preparation for it. The type of preparation is influenced by one's politicial compass, such as buying heirloom seeds and land for your polycule commune, or buying ammo and night-vision gear for your tacticool, boobytrapped
redoubt, but all are rooted in the same fundamental belief: that multiple levels of government can/will fail in one's lifetime. Not mere service interruption, but permanent, catastrophic failure that kills government dead, with no replacement.
Exactly, DuskOS is for maintaining a somewhat degraded level of civilization and perhaps rebuilding, while salvaged machines are still common. CollapseOS is there if things get even worse, to retain a minimal level of computing capability during the transition to whatever comes next. It’s hard to imagine the need for CollapseOS while things are still working, but in some horrible future where it’s the only system keeping the water system running, people will appreciate it.
The additional value in Collapse OS is that — as the hardware capable of running even Dusk OS (let alone a more complicated 32+-bit operating system) continues to break down and dwindle in supply — you still have an option such that you can reasonably-comfortably use those more constrained systems for simple tasks and free up the complicated hardware for complicated tasks. You don't need a multicore 64-bit CPU to keep a typical water system running; an 8-bit microcontroller is typically enough, and having a software stack already ready to go (including an ease of adapting to whatever specific hardware might be wired to that microcontroller's pins) is a pretty big deal even long before the point where we're shooting each other over the last Z80s and PICs.
It’s still a thing, although I think VARA is more popular right now. IMHO the weak signal modes are getting more use because many newer hobbyists don’t have the money or space for high powered setups.
There are even people building BBS like functionality onto JS8Call.
My biggest problem with the bill is the attempt to sweep in all devices/operating systems.
Make a new legal category for voluntary kid-friendly devices and draw regulatory borders around it, if you must, but leave the rest of us out of it. Then encourage parents and schools to limit kids to those devices. There would still be problems with this, but at least it wouldn’t impact the free speech, privacy, or free association of adults.
There was also the recent news about sites beginning to block the Internet Archive. Feels like we are gearing up for the next phase of the information war.
I may find short form video distasteful, but it’s less distasteful than those who want to dictate the media formats that others consume. Get a grip, people.
reply