[ih] Preparing for the splinternet

Toerless Eckert tte at cs.fau.de
Sun Mar 13 08:10:55 PDT 2022


On Sun, Mar 13, 2022 at 10:50:19AM -0400, Miles Fidelman via Internet-history wrote:
> Toerless Eckert wrote:
> > 
> > How about "The Internet was built for adults" ?
> > 
> Was it?  An awful lot of it was built for students - first university level,
> but quickly extended to K-12.  And that's before commercial services aimed
> specifically at kids.

What i said was meant as a cynical (im)possible post-factum justification for
why we pushed up the problem of access control for decades now, still  without
a comprehensive solution. As in "how could the Internet ever have been designed
without tackling that problem ? Oh well, because it was bilt for adults".

> At this point, it's infrastructure, used by everybody - kind of like the
> phone system, or the post.
> 
> Now access controls, based on age, seem totally appropriate

except for the obvious problem of jurisdiction based policies vs. the desire for
unfethered global connectibvity and location anonymity... ?

> - but even then,
> one can get into trouble really quickly:  Consider the "child safety"
> controls that prevent kids, at libraries, from accessing various kinds of
> health information.

Sure. But for age sensitive access control at the edge to Internet content,
i think there should be of helpful options (like what i mentioned) that don't
produce false positives, so i am still baffled why not more progressis made. Seems
like an ongoing battle between folks who don't want to do anything on one side
("slippery slope"), and folks clueless how to do it on the other side.

Cheers
    Toerless
> 
> Mile Fidelman
> 
> -- 
> In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
> In practice, there is.  .... Yogi Berra
> 
> Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.
> Practice is when everything works but no one knows why.
> In our lab, theory and practice are combined:
> nothing works and no one knows why.  ... unknown
> 
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tte at cs.fau.de



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