Is some decade(s) old post of mine from some old forum really still floating around somewhere out there on some random old server chugging along?

The No Such Agency probably has a copy in its data centre in Utah. Other nation state actors probably have one as well if it’s the singular and not the plural (decade).

deleted by creator

Minors can and have used more or less most of the internet safely. What is most of the internet? Services like Omegle or Chaturbate or Stripchat surely are not on it.

Well that claim is a bit arbitrary IMHO. For one I don’t see a reason to exclude those services you mentioned from being part of “most of the internet”. On the contrary, from what I see all of them are clearnet services, accessible to the public, so this extraordinary claim would need some evidence toward it I would say. Secondly the latter two are explicitly pornographic in nature, so I don’t really see the relevance towards the point of children being harmed by accessing them; They shouldn’t be there in the first place. There is of course a valid discussion about moderation to be had if they are used to distribute CSAM, but that seems orthogonal to the question of parental oversight of minors internet use.

Minors have used social media all this while, and other than what Facebook/Instagram on behest of US capitalist machinery has done to minors, […] most services do not abuse human psychology to this degree.

Again, only according to your arbitrary definition of what “most services” are. Basically all of social media is doing attention hacking, large swaths of of the gaming industry intentionally abuse dopamine cycles to sell worthless “digital goods”, the www is full of dark patterns in large part fuelled by advertisement delivery. I mean Meta is indubitably a front runner in the race of surveillance capitalism, but isn’t that an argument in favour of Omegle in the context of this discussion? Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp are much more certainly than Omegle a part of “most of the internet” after all, however you define that, and they are a clear and present danger to children.

However, children’s minds are highly neuroplastic until adulthood, and a lot of the internet is damaging to the psyche of children, which is an entirely different discussion. If that seems like flipflopping, it is because internet safety has various degrees to it and the definition of safety varies from healthy usage to consumerism to addiction to gray area to developing deviant persona and even illegal uses.

I don’t think it is a different discussion at all, rather it’s exactly the crux of the issue. The psyche of children is vulnerable; How do we best protect it and who is in the best position to effectively do so?

It is fairly known how peer pressure wins over parental control on minor access to internet, so the “parent’s duty” argument is very flaky and invalid. Education on things rest of the society is freely using is not very conducive to children at the age of puberty (12-16), and 18 is supposedly the adult age.

It might not be a definitive argument, but certainly not invalid. A parent is chiefly responsible for the safety, education, and behaviour of their children in basically all other areas of life. This responsibility doesn’t go away because the neighbours kids peer pressured them into throwing stones through a window or drinking alcohol. Why should access to the internet be any different?

So is the argument now going to be letting kids do whatever they want by the time they are 18?

Well yes, but within the confines of legality obviously. That’s literally the status quo in most jurisdictions, isn’t it?!

Or will this be decided upon a combination of evaluation of mental age using tests related to Asperger’s, neurodivergence, ADHD and so on? How frequently will these tests be taken by kids?

Gee I hope not. That sounds like the abyss below the slippery slope. But I don’t think anybody argued for that.

Will there be exposure of the child to concepts like “absolute American freedom” and various forms of consumerism? Because that is what the child will get exposed to, as soon as he/she meets people outside home, or goes to the market with parents.

Again, I don’t see the relevance to the Omegle situation. This is just life, the world is a dangerous place and while society can help by creating laws and such in the end the ones in the best position to safeguard their children according to their own world view will be the parents. Of course that is a duty in which every individual parent will inevitably fail by some metric, but so will society. Case in point, many children will be exposed to “absolute American freedom and various forms of consumerism” inside their own homes already, so if that’s your metric as a parent the only one who could ever protect a child from that is you, by preparing them for their inevitable confrontation with those concepts and hoping they take that lesson to heart.

Their argument comes off as distasteful, even though a whole decade of video streaming exists as proof of Omegle being a key mainstream hub for minor sexual abuse content, with no kinds of methods used by the evasive service owner to combat it. Read the link I supplied in above comments regarding that.

Yeah you claimed variously that it is a key part of Omegle “content”, for which I don’t see much corroborating evidence in the links you provided. Both the BBC story and the NCOSE piece seem to reference the same case of an 11 year old girl using the service unsupervised.

Which leads me to why I’m taking issue with the statement of Omegle having content. It doesn’t in the sense most people would understand that. It revolves around having a conversation with an absolute stranger, and either side of this conversation can record it or publish it. There is no content here unless one participant creates it and distributes it elsewhere than Omegle, or takes other content and distributes it on Omegle. Everything on Omegle is content in the same sense as a phone call is content, to which I would argue it isn’t, at least not inherently. It’s an ephemeral conversation unless a participant records it.

It might be content in the sense argued by the law and the court in the “A.M Vs Omegle” case, but that apparently ended in the motion to dismiss being partly granted and partly denied, which to me as a layperson sounds like a win for Omegle, at least temporarily.

Furthermore you say Omegle and Brooks didn’t do anything against the abuse, but this is in direct contradiction to what Brooks claims in the message in the OP:

Omegle worked with law enforcement agencies, and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, to help put evildoers in prison where they belong. There are “people” rotting behind bars right now thanks in part to evidence that Omegle proactively collected against them, and tipped the authorities off to.

And this is all besides the point that giving an 11 year old unsupervised access to Omegle is kind of the same as letting them out into the shady part of town to talk to random strangers (when you ignore the added risk of physical harm there of course). That’s what the website was principally about, meeting random strangers. And if a parent were to let their child do that unsupervised in offline life we would put at least part of the blame for any harm on them.

The internet wasn’t designed with the safety of children in mind, in fact not with anybodies safety in mind. Saying that it should be is an opinion, but in any case not the current reality. That leaves the majority of responsibility for the safety of children on the parents. And there is a bunch of things they can do, like not giving them networked devices in the first place, or restricting network access with whitelists, or educating them before the parents or others do give access. Yes, this parental control breaks down in social settings, but that is the case for a lot of different aspects of life and I don’t see how purging everything dangerous for children from the public internet is either a possible or even a desirable solution to this problem.

Take for example what you and the NCOSE argued for, age verification. The state of the art for that on many explicitly pornographic services is a simple dialogue asking if the user is of legal age in their jurisdiction. The infrastructure to do otherwise, which would require a governmentally issued digital ID of some kind, doesn’t exist in most countries let alone globally. Never mind the implications this would have for user privacy. Some services use a certain identifier so that their service can be automatically filtered, but that again leaves the parents with the responsibility to set up and maintain said filter. And in the end there will not be a way around that at all, unless you purposely rebuild the internet with a level of control it simply is not engineered to provide currently.

You should be able to see clearly that I am quite interested in such discussions without the moderator part.

Well the one who brought that into the discussion was you. Not to diminish your efforts, but I stand by what I said on the matter earlier.

Minors can use most of the internet safely.

I beg to differ. Minors can’t safely use the internet at all, it’s the internet. Every depth of the human psyche is mirrored onto it, and frankly any guardian letting a child onto it without at the minimum strong primers on its dangers is derilict of their duty. Which might have been excusable 20-30 years ago when everybody was confused about what the internet even is, but not so much in 2023.

If you make another deranged argument like that, you will get the banhammer.

Just for clarity, I’m not the person you said this to, but I think if you are out here threatening people with bans over a rhetorical question, you might want to take a break. Nevermind the disconnect between you saying you haven’t used it at all but purpoting to know exactly what kind of “content” was on it these last years, when it didn’t even really have content in the usual sense of the word.

More than 5,700 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli airstrikes since the war began, according to the Hamas-run Ministry of Health in Gaza, the New York Times reported.

I would take this number always with a grain of salt.

Understandable, it’s a claim made by a partisan faction after all. That said, according to this random X/Twitter account the IDF itself claimed two days ago to have made “over 10,000 targeted strikes” on Gaza since the beginning of the current conflict, so the casualty number given by Hamas works out to about 0.57 fatalities per strike, which doesn’t seem like that outlandish a claim to me given how densely populated Gaza is.

Well sorry. No offence intended.

Unclear to me, according to the OP the service is set to manual start. But there is an event trigger attached to the service and the article doesn’t mention what that event is.

I think you misunderstand. The way Wikipedia uses the word is the original usage, so only funny if you don’t know about it. Applying it to bar fights and such is the tongue-in-cheek usage.

From Latin belligerans (“waging war”), present active participle of belligerō (“I wage war”), from belliger (“waging war, warlike”), from bellum (“war”) + -ger (from gerō (“I lead, wage, carry on”)).

A VPN provider has the same level of insight into your traffic as an ISP does when not using a VPN. If having one installed without your consent isn’t a privacy issue I don’t know what is…

This is literal fake news. Climate change is certainly a thing. Flowers blooming in Antarctica currently is not.

Uhm, your own source says differently though?

While a 2022 study did find a global warming-related expansion in the range of two Antarctic flowering plants, the photo does not show those plant species.

If I’m understanding your question right, kind of. Pandoc is only for document conversion though, no spreadsheets, presentations, etc. But at that it can convert between a lot of formats. And git can be used to version and share those documents.

Nothing, I’d just like a nice GUI around it.

Well like uzay said, basically just an office GUI that allows me to import/export into a lot of formats and automates document versioning away.

Haha, kind of. However conversion between all these formats is lossy in some directions and I don’t know of any software that integrates version control of documents by default (not saying there are none).

P.S.: Yes I know, https://xkcd.com/927/

Quarto looks quite interesting indeed, thanks for pointing it out!

For those interested it’s an “Open-source scientific and technical publishing system built on Pandoc”

https://quarto.org/
https://github.com/quarto-dev/quarto-cli

Like a data format inhabiting the centre of that conversion graph they have on their website, basically a superset of the available input types, that is then version controlled by git, and can be exported to any of the output formats, in a neat frontend that removes all that complexity from me. :D

Shameless plug for Pandoc because I love it

That scalable vector graphic on the page shows source document type on the left and target type on the right. TL;DL: It converts about two dozen document types into about three dozen document types.

P.S.E.G.: PDF ← Markdown ←→ HTML → PDF

P.P.S: Where are my manners? Image transcription added to post.

How would Lanchester’s law apply? I admittedly never heard of it before, but I don’t see equivalents for army size and damage ratio here…

Anyway, the answer to your question is probably just population growth. We needed a critical mass of “useless” people not preoccupied with subsistence for science-y stuff to gain enough traction and spread.

There were democracies before industrialisation by the way, e.g. in ancient Greece.

Okay, thoughtful argument but still…

Well thanks, however this compliment seems a bit like a poisoned chalice considering the rest of your replies.

Who gets to decide when to use violence then? For what reason? When is it okay and when is it not? What is the line?

We have been through this, the line is that it has to be a last resort. FYI, this concept is literally enshrined in our constitution:

Article 20
[…]
(4) All Germans shall have the right to resist any person seeking to abolish this constitutional order if no other remedy is available.

You say it’s okay when people have opinions that you disagree with. Granted, those options are really very shitty opinions, but they’re that: opinions. This person you’ll be punching hasn’t hit you, hasn’t attacked you. He said or displayed things you don’t like.

No, I say it’s okay when people have opinions that are a clear and present danger to a tolerant society. Again, we have been over this, it’s know as the paradox of tolerance. What these people do is attack civil society by abusing its rules, and you seem to propose we let them without keeping violence as a last resort, except for immediate self-defence of your person. Saying for example that all Jews or Muslims should be killed or that refugees deserve no asylum is technically an opinion, but it is also an attack on human rights and civil society. And you should stand up to that, if you deem it necessary with violence.

And yes, answering intolerance with intolerance seems like circular logic, because it is. That’s why it’s called a paradox. But IMHO you should consider that we are talking about something where our language, also a system of circular logic by the way, breaks down.

So where is the line? You can punch him if he displays a swastika?

Well this one is easy in Germany at least, because it’s literally illegal. I’ll report them to police and they will get up to three years in prison for it pursuant to § 86a of the criminal code (display of anti-constitutional symbols).

How about me displayjng a swastika, you punch me and oops, it’s a religious symbol from India…

Those are usually turned the other way and not displayed at a 45° angle. Nazi iconography is in most cases clearly distinguishable from Hindu and Shinto iconography, and if it’s not you can ask first. I will say however that when you claim to display an Asian religious symbol while being white, having a shaved head, wearing a bomber jacket and jump boots, I’m not inclined to believe you.

Doesn’t matter for my locale though, people here usually chose to just not display it outside of temples to avoid this obvious misunderstanding.

Who gets to decide who to punch? WHO?

The one doing the punching. If it was justified will be decided by the courts, as you said. And yeah, unless you have a very good reason you will probably be convicted of assault, since the state claims a monopoly on violence. However some would argue, including me, that sometimes the only way to defend the existence of civil society lies outside its rules. It’s called civil disobedience.

Nazi’s exist as much as roman legionaries exist. The Roman Empire is gone and so is Nazi Germany. That somebody would love to be one is a different thing. I’d love to be a samurai but those too no longer exists. Slapping a label on it doesn’t change that. I can dress up and play one but that’s not the same. There are neo-Nazi’s out there for sure, wannabees. There are no Nazi’s.

Yeah ok, first off the time frame and circumstances are a little different here. The Roman Empire and the samurai caste have been gone a bit longer than Nazi Germany. Every single member of those organisations is long dead. This is not the case for Nazis, and they had ample opportunity to pass on their ideology to later generations, which they did. There aren’t, to my knowledge, any large groups of people self-identifying as Roman legionaries or samurai, except for LARPing purposes. There are however a lot of them seriously self-identifying as Nazis. I don’t see what you or I would gain by denying that they are.

Secondly, to classify them as neo-Nazis instead of actual Nazis, and maintaining that there is a relevant difference in that regarding their level of intolerance towards other groups is bonkers. In context, i.e. whether they present a clear and present danger to civil society, it’s a distinction without a difference. And if you want to hold on to this ridiculous premise this entire discussion is kind of pointless.

You seem to be of the persuasion that liberal democracies aren’t endangered by fascism or other forms of totalitarianism anymore, I fail to see why that would be the case. On the contrary, history teaches us that this is a constant danger. There is a reason the principle of defensive democracy was made into law by a lot of nations after the second world war.

Stop with the dumb slogans. Everybody knows that Nazi’s were bad and “punch a Nazi” only leads to assholes calling others they don’t like Nazi’s.

It also leads to Nazis being punched. I don’t think we will reach agreement on this, so thanks for the - mostly - respectful discussion. At the risk of being accused of using dumb slogans again, I’ll leave you with a quote from a German pastor who was put into the concentration camps for his believes:

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
— Martin Niemöller

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