There's no (state) school giving out tablets that aren't pretty much single-use locked down devices.

That's the parents.

The expectation that "Parenting" is now outsourced to Teachers, to the Government, to anyone else. People seem to expect they just have a kid, and somehow magically they'll grow up to be a perfect person without any work from themselves. So there's over-reach, there's pressure on making "unworkable" soutions, because the people they're trying to force "solving" the problem aren't the people in the best position to do so.

Your comment seems working from that very same assumption.

Yes, all the "technical" part of content filtering etc. is very much a solved problem. The issue is that's not a "zero effort" solution - they still need to be enabled and managed. And I'm not sure that's a "technical" problem than can be solved.

There's huge pressure on teachers etc. to "solve" these sort of problems - just go to any PTA meeting and there's a lot of loud voices asking for stuff like the laws the original post is highlighting. And politicians listen to the loud voices, and feel they have to be "seen" doing something. Even if that "something" is impossible, unworkable, and fundamentally harmful.

In theory „There's no (state) school giving out tablets that aren't pretty much single-use locked down devices.“

In practice, most schools lack anyone with enough technical literacy to lock down the device. So they just hand out unlocked cheap android tablets with all the stock spyware and advertisement pre-installed.

They don't "hand out" anything really - probably the closest thing is government programmes to fund laptops/tablets for low income families, but not a single school locally "gives out" tablets to kids. But they're all just "normal retail" devices.

They have some things used in lessons, but they're all given out at the beginning of the lesson, then gathered at the end.

You could argue that it's a problem they they assume home access to such things anyway - especially in later years - as things like online 'homework' is the norm.

Again, this is not true. Some public schools do buy ipads and licenses and do hand them out and some times they're unlocked. You COULD do a basic google search and learn about the topic on the news, you're you don't actually care to learn, you're just spreading noise.

Again my experience with local schools doesn't match that, though I'd acknowledge that local authority can cause a lot of differences. And I'm talking about state schools - not public schools. Remember that means a very different thing in the UK, and might suggest your own distance from the claims you seem to be making.

And googling only seems to find examples of the low income programmes. I struggle to find a single instance when devices are handed out to kids and not keep at school and only used in specific tasks - like the old trolley of laptops was a few years ago.

Or breathless reactionary commentary without any actual examples of course.

“There's no (state) school giving out tablets that aren't pretty much single-use locked down devices.”

They try, but kids are smart and there are holes in the tools to lock things down. You would not believe the inventive workarounds that kids find to circumvent content filters. It’s a losing battle to lock everything.

We figured out that if you clicked on the context menu fast enough we could bypass the block on “Run as administrator” and the rest was history.

Totally agree with you here, but this law - which I’m deeply offended was passed unanimously by our spineless legislators - will solve none of it.

> The expectation that "Parenting" is now outsourced to Teachers, to the Government, to anyone else. People seem to expect they just have a kid, and somehow magically they'll grow up to be a perfect person without any work from themselves. So there's over-reach, there's pressure on making "unworkable" soutions, because the people they're trying to force "solving" the problem aren't the people in the best position to do so.

Yeah, because the parents' time is now dedicated to their employers. When parenting wasn't outsourced, families typically had a parent at home doing it full time.

Don't blame the parents and ignore the story of reduced family capacity.

> Yeah, because the parent's time is now dedicated to their employers. When parenting wasn't outsourced, families typically had a parent at home doing it.

This seems to imply that the problem is that we started letting women work, but I suspect the actual problem is back to restrictive zoning again.

If you let people actually build housing, and then some people have two incomes, they use the extra money to build a big new house or drive newer cars etc. If you instead inhibit new construction, the people with two incomes outbid the families with one income for the artificially constrained housing stock, and then every family needs two incomes and like flipping a switch you go from "women are empowered by allowing them to work" to "women are oppressed by requiring them to work".

I don't think just building more housing is sufficient. That might decrease the cost of living somewhat, but probably not enough to remove the need for a second income.

I think ideally most families should be able to survive on the income of one parent, regardless of which parent that is. But I'm not sure how to get there, although I think the problem is closely tied to wealth inequality.

I also think in a better world, it would be practical for both parents to work, but work fewer hours, each working 20 hours a week. But in the US at least that generally isn't practical because most such jobs don't provide health insurance or retirement plans, and are typically very low paying jobs.

>I don't think just building more housing is sufficient. That might decrease the cost of living somewhat, but probably not enough to remove the need for a second income.

While shadowy special interest groups and large corporations are able to write text directly into the laws of anglophone countries, The People can't even talk about one instance without fragmenting into a trillion pieces covering topics such as the affordability of housing.

I don't disagree with you about affordability of housing. I just don't think that that by itself is sufficient to solve the problem of households needing two incomes.

This is the thing where bad proposals are easier to come up with than good ones. If you want to actually fix it you need to identify the root cause, come up with a viable, efficient, effective means of addressing it, and then get it enacted.

If all you want to do is pass a bad law, all you have to do is pay money.

The left wing constantly says “we started letting women work”. Women have worked for thousands of years. The phenomenon of manipulating women into believing working for a corporation is some kind of “higher calling” is relatively new, and it’s been a disaster for the family unit.

We can distinguish these two things, right?

One is that people tell women it's good to work for a corporation, some of them believe that to be true and choose to do it, the others retain and exercise the option to do something else.

The other is that we set up an artificial scarcity treadmill so that if some families have two incomes, they outbid the ones that don't on life necessities and then women have to take a job at a corporation in order to be able to afford to live indoors even if that's not what they would otherwise choose to do.

Well the first naturally led to the other. So you can distinguish them, but they are not separate.

In order to get from the first to the second, you need the artificial scarcity laws, and we ought not to keep those.

I disagree. You simply increase the supply of labour by by double digit percentage points. Thinking this will not affect the price, all else being equal, is magical thinking.

You're ignoring the other side of the ledger. If the supply of labor increases, but then those people get paid money, then they spend it and create additional demand for labor.

How do you suppose a country with 100 million people can have the same standard of living, if not higher, than a country with 10 million people despite having ten times the supply of labor? Or for that matter that large populous cities can have higher paying jobs than small towns?

I mean women recognize that they've worked for thousands of years and wanted to start getting paid for it.

> I mean women recognize that they've worked for thousands of years and wanted to start getting paid for it.

Another case of capitalist thinking infecting everything. Why must the market swallow everything? It's fucking totalitarian.

Women have been paid to work for thousands of years. The quality of education that results in far left thinking is resoundingly poor.

> The left wing constantly says “we started letting women work”.

I’ve literally never seen anyone on the left (and rarely even the liberal capitalist center-right) say that. I’ve seen people on the hard right, when complaining, use that framing, though.

And, look, here its part of a complaint glorifying the defects of the capitalist-patriarchal family and whining that more equal treatment of women in the economic sphere hurt the “family unit” rather than recognizing that capitalism wrecks the family unit and greater equality for women just reduces the particular systematic of oppression of women within the capitalist-patriarchal system, but neither cures nor causes the damage to the family unit that comes from capitalism.

You’re of course free to pretend to be unaware of embarrassing left wing rhetoric. But the idea that capitalism hurt the family unit doesn’t really square with reality. The first order of Marxism is the explicit destruction of the family unit in favor of “chosen family” and the state.

Parents don't have the right tools to minimize harm to their kids online. The parental controls offered by Apple and Google were intentionally designed to be full of holes.

And incredibly hard to use, and very buggy.

You're talking about a solved problem and a few comments down there's a bunch of people in this very comment thread losing their minds about Linux devs working on implementing parental controls.

> The expectation that "Parenting" is now outsourced to Teachers, to the Government, to anyone else. People seem to expect they just have a kid, and somehow magically they'll grow up to be a perfect person without any work from themselves. So there's over-reach, there's pressure on making "unworkable" soutions, because the people they're trying to force "solving" the problem aren't the people in the best position to do so.

NOT giving children addictive devices isn't not outsourcing parenting, it's basic social responsibility. Like not giving them cigarettes. I find it encourating that most other commenters understand this.

> There's no (state) school giving out tablets that aren't pretty much single-use locked down devices.

False, and this betrays that you have no experience with what you're talking out.

>>> Controlling what children do online is a solved problem: Parenting and parental control applications. >This is absolutely not true.Here in the UK schools are swarming with ipads and shit like that. They're given to primary school children because they're "more engaging". Children are supposed to practice their reading and even handwriting on ipads. Naturally they're on youtube instead. It's really bad.

And how does that refute what the parent said? Those school ipads could also have YouTube locked or restricted to a whitelist of channels.

> Those school ipads could also have YouTube locked or restricted to a whitelist of channels.

There's so much wrong here.

A) there's ways around that stuff that any child can figure out.

B) schools aren't in fact obligated to enable those, and some don't.

C) who decides on what channels are allowed? The school does. But teachers are basically people off the street that did some basic training and (from my experience) have zero critical thinking. This are not the best and brightest.

D) big tech will tell you "this is age appropriate" and the only thing that means is that you probably won't see porn. Anything else, including gambling ads on youtube, you do see.

You see, you're trying to discuss the specifics which in this case is a losing approach if your goal is to protect your chidlren from being victimized by the attention economy. The reason is that those benefiting from the attention economy have more lawyers and more engineers to deploy than any individual parent.

>A) there's ways around that stuff that any child can figure out.

No, there are not for hardware locked devices with the proper controls (what apps, websites, etc to allow).

>B) schools aren't in fact obligated to enable those, and some don't.

The technical problem is solved, if they don't want to implement the solution that's on them.

>C) who decides on what channels are allowed? The school does. But teachers are basically people off the street that did some basic training and (from my experience) have zero critical thinking. This are not the best and brightest.

Again, irrelevant. A common policy can be created (e.g. by ministry of education experts) and shared with schools.

> > B) schools aren't in fact obligated to enable those, and some don't.

> The technical problem is solved, if they don't want to implement the solution that's on them.

Just to be clear - do you not understand that a parent might be parenting, but some times their children is in care of a school? Your focus on "a technical solution exists" is missing the real issue here, and it's not a technical one.

I'm talking about both parents and schools: the technical solution exists. If parents/schools don't want to implement it, that's on them.

This answers your objection A and B. C is also a non-probem with a trivial fix, as I showed.

What we're discussing is whether age verification is needed. Based on the existence of other, perfectly fine solutions, it's not. "But schools don't bother implementing those other solutions" is not a counter-argument to this discussion.

> If parents/schools don't want to implement it, that's on them

Well that's not much of a solution is it now? More like an attempt that we all can see will fail.

Harm reduction is not the same as a solution.

But it is an argument against age restrictions since you could just as easily pass a law that instead required schools to enable various filters. You could even require mainstream devices from major manufacturers to support certain filtering standards. And you could require websites to send self categorization headers.

There is no valid argument for why ID checks are necessary if the goal is simply to get filtering implemented in places such as schools.

If instead the goal is to entirely prohibit all children from using social networks regardless of parental consent then it makes sense. It also makes sense if the goal is actually to violate privacy or something similarly sinister.

I don't really give a damn about the freedom to say stuff on the internet, so you're trying to convince the wrong person.

That's unfortunate, but what I said had nothing to do with that. I merely refuted the basis of your prior objection.

You just want censorship and state control. So perhaps you have the wrong ideas. Your "solutions" are worse than the problems.

I'm not sure why I need to debate against obvious illogical positions, but here we go:

> Well that's not much of a solution is it now? More like an attempt that we all can see will fail.

Some entities not wanting to implement a perfectly fine technical solution is not the same as "that's not a solution". If schools not bothering is your issue, just like the state can mandate a "age verification", it can also mandate schools add such parental control locks to the devices they give to kids.

>Harm reduction is not the same as a solution.

It absolutely is, and that's what any solution will be anyway.

There's no perfect solution short of throwing kids in some kind of restricted area without access to any devices. And even in prison prisoners get ahold of startphones.

Age verification can be beaten even more easily, getting access from some older kid for example, borrowing or buying verified accounts, getting an older/hacked OS that doesn't check, and countless other holes.

The difference is that the parent controls case directly affects the device the kids have, let's the parents set the policy based on their beliefs and the child's mental maturity (not authoritarian one-size-fits-all approach), and doesn't add OS mandated id and age tracking to everybody regardless if they're kids or not.

> There's no perfect solution

A solution—ie, solving a problem—does in fact imply perfection.

Only in mathematics or in some rigid aspie conception of the term "solution". But we're not debating about solutions in cartoon land.

If real-world solution implied "perfect" there would be no debate regarding better and worse solutions concerning their results - which is what social and political and team and inter-personal and even ...spousal debates are all about.

And that's about merely inherent issues, before we even come to how a proposed solution interplays with other things (e.g. mandatory age verification vs privacy, or policing vs personal freedom, or censorship vs innovation and authoritarianism).

In real life practical solutions always have tradeoffs and weak spots, but can nonetheless make the problem much smaller as to effectively be irrelevant or at an acceptable level.

>but some times their children is in care of a school?

And not only that but some of those times are dinner break, on a school campus with a thousand other kids and barely any supervision. Even if phones are banned, it's easy to hide one and for a child to be showing their friends unhinged stuff they found on 4chan.

And some of those times are on a bus carrying at least 50 kids when they're 'supervised' only by a driver ... and so on.

>Even if phones are banned, it's easy to hide one and for a child to be showing their friends unhinged stuff they found on 4chan.

That would still reduce ther exposure by 1-2 orders of magnitude, which is perfectly acceptable.

I mean, we all saw the occasional heinous stuff, goatse, lemon party, etc, that doesn't ruin you. I don't think preventing them from ever seeing anything disturbing is a realistic goal. It's more an issue when kids are allowed to be fully addicted on an ongoing basis instead of spending their time doing things that help them grow. I think keeping them from spending all their free time on youtube or in Roblox is more the goal.

This, it's the stupid addictive games like Roblox and social media like YouTube. Circling back to schools (not-UK), here even teachers let them play Roblox sometimes in primary school on school hardware. The problem as a parent is that you cannot get upset and fight about everything, you need to pick your battles. This is made worse that you are most likely a minority, most parents will say/think a little Roblox or Tik Tok at school is harmless fun.

IMO the problem is twofold: first, younger kid's brains are not developed enough to deal with games and social media that are intentionally made to be addictive. Heck, even a lot of adults have issues limiting their time. Addictive games and social media should just be forbidden under 16 years. Currently our government has only issued a recommendation, which does nada. Second, teachers and parents need to be educated better. Many have no idea that these addictive apps are an issue or just don't fully realize the damage they do.

That's a good point.

But you know, I find it frustrating that the people we're talking to clearly have no experience with the subject but they come in here and state with confidence they're opinion on something which is for them a hypothetical. They don't know what's going on.

> Even if phones are banned, it's easy to hide one and for a child to be showing their friends unhinged stuff they found on 4chan.

Age verification doesn't solve that though.

Same argument(s) can be applied to age verification.

But this thread is discussing the technical solution and how many jurisdictions are pretending there’s no technical solutions just so they can pass surveillance legislation?

The schools could also simply not distribute tablets or laptops to students. The technology has not produced noticeably better readers, thinkers, or writers compared to the days when students read actual books and wrote on paper.

In fact this would be a great way to curb LLM cheating

Checking what the school is exposing the children to is part of parenting, if enough parents demand parental controls on the iPad you'd get that. Also it sounds insane that any school is given children iPads, if anything the studies show worse outcomes with iPads

> Checking what the school is exposing the children to is part of parenting, if enough parents demand parental controls on the iPad you'd get that.

Yes, but often times enough parents DONT demand that.

Most parents think "ipads are a good thing children need to learn tech in order to have good jobs". Other parents think "ipads aren't good but if I complain I'll be that annoying parent that no one likes". Only a minority is vocal.

Exactly. We've completely lost (actually never had it) any social responsibility on the part of the social media/tech companies. Before we had the internet and all these apps and devices, parents looked after what their kids did but could also pretty much rely on other businesses to not do things like sell their kids cigarettes or pornography, let them in to R-rated movies, or expose them to other age-inappropriate stuff. Did it happen? Yes here and there but it wasn't easy for most kids.

Parents just want to be able to designate a device as belonging to a child---one setting---and have that respected. Not to have to dig into the settings of every account, service, app, and website and figure out how to set it in age-restricted mode (if that's even possible).

The tech companies have made this way too difficult and now they are facing the consequences of their shameful neglect by having to deal with all these new laws (which they will probably ignore, with no consequences, but we'll see).

It's understandable that parents are upset, but tech companies are not the ones harmed by these laws. When we've outlawed privacy, it will be the public who suffers.

In fact the big tech companies are involved in creating these laws.

> Parents just want to be able to designate a device as belonging to a child---one setting---and have that respected.

The problem here is, what does that actually do?

If you say the device is for kids, can the kids then see content related to firearms? What if the parents are Republicans and don't want that censored for their kids? Also, what does it even mean? Does a YouTube video on firearm safety get blocked because it contains firearms? Should "kids" be able to view sex education content?

If nobody agrees what should be blocked then the reason they don't have a setting is that nobody knows how to implement it.

Since schooling closer to home obviously solves this problem, and a host of many other problems, and doesn't introduce any real problems (bad schools don't save kids from bad parents, which seems to be a rebuttal to home-based education, it would seem to me the answer is obvious:

Return to a single income household economy and bring education closer to the home, if not outright in the home.

But this is ridiculous. The problem was created by the state (which ultimately runs the schools), and now the state wants to impose additional rules on a bunch of totally unrelated adults to (probably fail to) solve their self-imposed problem.

You're saying that because you fell for the scam. Seriously, every "think of the children" initiative is a scam.

And especially for that one it was quite obvious lawmakers were purchased to introduce these laws.

And there are receipts, too: https://codeberg.org/svin/meta-lobbying-and-other-findings

I volunteer at a makerspace, twice already adults came to seek help "bricking" their smartphone, so it can only be used when a certain RFID token is present, the problem is there exist commercial solutions aimed at companies and institutions, where the employee can't disengage the lock, and then theres commercial (and open source) solutions aimed at individuals, but these can always be easily disengaged and bypassed.

I agree that children's elders (parents, teachers, ...) should be able to control the available apps and platforms, but only for a reasonably short period (so that kids don't grow up in censorship right until they are adult, it should be continuously relaxed until the kids are in control of their own impulses, so whatever mechanism is used, it should gradually relax willy nilly the opinions of the elders or the state).

This brings up the next problem: what if parents mutually disagree? and what if teachers mutually disagree? and what if parents and teachers disagree? So there should be some kind of jurisdiction awareness in the parental control system: when at mothers place, mothers rules, when at fathers place, fathers rules, when in this or that teachers class their rules, as that would be the technological agnostic position (regardless if the old ways were good or bad, thats what technological non-interference would suggest).

But even if all parents, all teachers agreed on the parental control settings for a child, they can't really do it effectively since they are placed at the whims of big tech, with clear visible conflicts of interest like advertising, engagement, etc.

To solve that government should mandate a simple secure way for the smartphone to accept a user generated cryptographic public key, upon proving ownership so that they can sign their own root, first non-ROM (actual silicon ROM, not firmware images) op-codes chosen by the user. Then they can install any open source parental control software they want.

Its the surveillance state refusing to give the populace the keys to their own smartphone, and then deciding to "solve" the resultant inability for effective and community controlled parental control mechanisms by degrading privacy for all.

"we have to reign in your privacy, because we refuse to give you the ability to sign your own bootloaders, for freedom and safety of course"

every time we have people complain about how expensive "bricking" software and effective parental control software are (the commercial solutions aimed at companies and institutions, which have special arrangements with smartphone industry), we should direct them to a petition to force an actual right to compute by mandating computers and smartphones allow the end-user to sign their bootloaders with a self-generated key of their choice.

Then the problems will disappear overnight, and solutions for this problem will come in a form like all the big beautiful free and open source software, and it will work, and it will be sane.

This is true but then why regulate every website instead of regulating... The schools

100% agree with you. I'm not arguing for regulating websites. In my scenario the schools are the actual problem. (EDIT: Actually, Meta and such companies are the actual problem, but in our world nobody expects that they have anybody's best interests in mind. But schools should.)

I was strictly only responding to the phrase "this is a solved problem you just have to parent".

LoL scapegoat found. Actually not a bad idea. "Your child must not bring any digital end device, that is, in fact or in principle capable to connect to the internet, and display graphical content in any form other than text. Needs for telecommunication do not constitute a claim for exemption. Parents who want their child to be able to make calls from a mobile phone, may supply their child with what's colloquially called a "dumbphone" ,i.e. a phone that is not capable of the aforementioned technical features. Breaches justify the exclusion of your chid from participation in class for the day, or in cases of repeated violations of this policy, of up to one week. The parent agrees to have the full responsibility for the care and supervision of their child upon short notice. Resulting financial losses that might follow in the aftermath of such a transferral of guardianship back to the parents on short notice from thus necessitated time commitments for them are their responsibility alone and cannot constitute claims against the school. The responsibility to catch up on thus missed lessons lies with the pupil alone and does not constitute the privilege to be excused from examinations.

In my country, state schools strictly forbid students from bringing devices to school. This rule was actually introduced because of the haves/have-nots issue here, because many kids are too poor to afford devices. The schools themselves don't provide devices because it would be prohibitively expensive due to the large student population. Most private schools don't allow devices either.

Schools are being regulated too, don't be facetious.

When people say "parental controls" they obviously don't literally mean "parental controls controlled by PARENTS", they mean "parental controls controlled by parents AND OTHER guardians such as teachers and schools".

If the school can't be bothered to lock down their ipads, why not make a law that schools must lock down the ipads, rather than push this out to everyone universally?

It seems like another shoddy excuse of a panicked panopticon to me. Feel free to try to convince us otherwise.

That the schools are unable to implement the technical solutions for parental control tells you about the schools, not about the technology.

And that parents rather have everyone's actions on the internet surveilled because they can't coordinate with their schools tells you about the parents.