XKEYSCORE, the UK system brought in to allow warrantless surveillance for national security purposes and child abuse prevention, ended up being used for such minor offences as catching people dumping rubbish in other people's bin, or parents lying about their child's address to get into a better school district. In the United States, the same system was used for low-level offences like cannabis possession.
UK Parliament accepting submissions for evidence regarding the effect of the Online Safety Act (including its failures and detrimental effects, I should note). Deadline is 7 September 2026.
All this ostensibly to keep teenage boys from watching Pornhub (when parental controls already exist).
The real reason, of course, is to force people to connect strong real-life identifiers to online activity. Mobile first, then Windows. Then Linux is too weak to oppose on its own, and will adapt or die.
> The real reason, of course, is to force people to connect strong real-life identifiers to online activity.
This is worse than that, this paves a way for corporations to shove anti-user crap (adware, spyware, "sideloading" restrictions etc) to devices that are mandatory for you.. and in a way you can't fight it, because now government is protecting that crap without even realizing it.
It's one thing that I can't install a custom OS on my credit card.. but it's a different thing when that device is actively connected to the network, sending my data to some US company, prevents me from removing bloatware / installing my own software.. and on top of that displays ads.
Some people want this. Other people want mass surveillance. Conveniently, they are aligned! The mass surveillance people will shoot down any version of age verification that doesn't also allow mass surveillance.
Not just exempting themselves, but actively building and deploying end-to-end encrypted chat apps for gov only use with (non)retention and (un)transparancy fully under their own control. Tbf, we're still waiting for Von Der Leyen's SMS's, and that was not even on such an app. Some can just ignore the law without repercussions.
"Maybe I'm naive, but I think there's no deeper motivation."
Maybe you are not naive. Maybe you are correct
This "real reason for age verification" trope might be just another braindead meme or conspiracy theory
No evidence has been presented to support what these commenters are suggesting
It stands to reeason that anyone who is truly concerned about "connect[ing] real-life identifiers to online activity" would be distancing themselves from using corporate-controlled mobile operating systems like Android or iOS, as opposed to thinking, something like, "I've got a good thing going here with Android and/or iOS and age verification is going to ruin it"
Yep. This is billionaire-led corruption of governments globally to buy legislation that takes away our rights. It benefits data brokers, intelligence agencies, and police.
"Mobile first, then Windows. Then Linux is too weak to oppose on its own, and will adapt or die."
How about NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, FreeDOS, Plan9
What's the timeline on this outcome
Anyone willing to place a bet on a prediction market
"Let me be direct about this: the likelihood of any legislature specifically targeting FreeBSD or OpenBSD with age verification mandates is close to zero."
Can't you just enroll your kid's devices in your home corporate and leverage MDM to force the network to call through your proxy, which denies or downgrades all ECH and then can actively filter to an allowlist or screen the material through your personal or contracted LLM?
> That's why governments want to do something about it in the first place.
Really ? Like what ? I never heard about mandated "working parental controls". I only heard about "protect the children" (where are the lawsuits against (church) rapists ?) and "protect about terrorism" ( where they twist the definition of "terrorism" to suit their political interests).
You know what Microsoft did with "parental controls" ?. It disabled Firefox. Of course you can still access ( "educational") porn sites through Edge.
The simplest parental control is just not giving your kid unrestricted internet access. It’s both cheaper and easier than the status quo.
I’m sorry, but if you don’t have a home computer in your living room for your kids homework, you haven’t put in any effort and I no longer care. Ideally nobody, anywhere, should care. You have to take actual steps. Very basic, easy steps.
Think about what you need technology for. To reach your kid, to do their homework. Okay. Now do you require 24/7 internet access on an arbitrary device for that? No. You can go to Walmart today and pick up a 20 dollar burner phone. But you didn’t, right? So do that first, analyze the landscape, and then I think there can be a conversation to be had.
Demanding a conversation or worse, a law, when the most basic steps have not been taken is frankly disrespectful. That’s how I view it, it’s a time wasting mechanism.
You physically restrict the device, as you would a knife or any other item you deem dangerous. I wouldn’t give, say, a ten year old 24/7 access to a butcher knife. No, it’s in the kitchen.
Does that 100% prevent bad things? No, but it’s obvious, cheap, and good enough that everybody stopped trying after that.
If you have a computer in the living room, I can guarantee that the odds that your son or daughter is watching something bad will be very low.
The great thing about these solutions is they require no complex machinery, either literally or politically. But if you look around, people just jump the gun past these solutions. Meaning, they’re not trying.
Which, IMO, if you don’t care about your kids, obviously then I don’t either. Which is fine because as a parent that’s your right, and I support that right.
great nothing of value lost. If someone wants to leak info they should stake their name next to it. That can be the whistleblower anonymously leaking to a journalist who publishes it.
That's a completely unhelpful, overly simplistic straw man argument.
We restrict certain activities and places in the real world from certain people all the time. For example, not allowing people under 18 or 21 (depending on your country) into casinos. What we have now is essentially unrestricted access to pretty much anything and a fair assessment is that there is societal harm from that. We're creating gambling addicts (which is arguably the most harmful form of addiction), allowing predators to interact with children,, manipulating children through advertising and algorithms, flaming harmful behaviors like eating disorders, allowing mass cyberbullying and so on.
So saying "we should allow unfettered access to the internet" or even "it's the parents' responsibility" is naive, dismissive and has failed. The only question from here is what to d we do about it. You can say "nothing" but that's a losing argument.
I personally believe that the easiest thign to attack is advertising to minors. This will take away the financial incentive for these platforms to create addictive behaivors in minors. And most of these tech platforms have already built the infrastructure to do this. You don't allow advertisers to target an audience based on (actual or inferred) ages under 18. You extend that to proxies for age, like an interest in Minecraft. And you make advertising to children illegal.
Arguably, I'd go further and restrict certain features for minors, such as comments on Youtube and an algorithmic feed.
At the moment nobody is solving anything because it's simply a fight to move liability to someone else. Meta wants hardware vendors to be responsible because, guess what?, they have no hardware platform. Apple and Google likely want app to have to deal with it for the complete opposite reason.
I believe we should shift that liability to advertising.
What's simplistic and unhelpful is falling for the narrative that infinite scroll, boobies, and algorithmic feeds are somehow more harmful than ubiquitous government surveillance of the most powerful communication tool on earth. The Internet, more or less, has been around 30+ years and the Something awful and 4chan generations are now in charge. We're not much worse off. The Internet is actually way tamer these days than it used to be.
We can all agree that yeah sure this social media stuff isn't great, but that's the whole point of freedom. Fast food isn't great either but lawmakers aren't pushing for a junk food attestation framework to make sure you don't consume it more than twice a week. In other words, your best interest is not interesting to them at all. They are happy that you think it is somehow self evident that we should subject ourselves to undue surveillance through!
So, wonder why they're pushing for this so hard. I'll take the brainrot if it means criticism and ideas can spread without permanently being associated with a trackable, unchanging identity.
Don't know about boobies, but I would guess META/other infinite scroll products are this generation's cigarettes in terms of long term harm and we do a severe disservice to all young people that are exposed to this product. Moreover, asking parents to intervene is obviously not going to work because they, themselves, have been partially ruined by it and lack the critical thinking required to intervene and the prowess to execute. Same reason why we needed government to intervene for cigarettes.
I am not endorsing removing all anonymity from being online, but continuing the status quo with social media is a non starter for humanity. So tell me how we can help kids not get ruined by the internet without a mechanism specifically identifying that they're online in the first place?
Then the solution could be just like the solution to tobacco addiction: tax social media companies HARD, tax all advertising on social media 10x, 20x, or ban advertising on/for social media outright, ban advertising of kids products, ban showing use of social media in movies not rated 18, ... the problem will vanish just like cigarettes.
But no, that's not what governments are doing. They want control and surveillance.
It would definitely help and I'd support it. I would much rather pay a fixed cost to use the internet and remove all the poisonous crap we're stuck dealing with to "keep the internet free".
Do you know what happen when advertising is banned? It would go underground -- product placement, contest, merchandises, and so on. Advertising existed as soon as commerce became a thing, probably thousand years ago. It can't be banned. I wouldn't vote for that.
Regulation, on the other hand, is fine. How? I don't know.
It'd be tough to phrase it right. Imagine that The Ones Who Ban Things decide to write something interpretable as essentially "nobody is allowed to inform others about things". The process of distilling any ad banning law into applicable testing of that law would be pretty scary to me
Taxing may be a good way to restore balance. Banning means goodbye online news, Google Search, Gmail, YouTube, Maps, Translate, ad-supported games, etc. -- basically everything we've become accustomed to having for free will want a monthly subscription.
This is the most sensible solution to this problem I have read on HN in the 2 years I've been here. Think of the positive effects taxation would have: no whack-a-mole for every loophole the industry will find. No single fines after costly court battles that are basically pocket change for Zuckerberg et al. Adherence to polluter-pays-priciple. Make it so that if they stop advertising, the tax expires. Use the tax money for better infrastructue. Make the tax progressive - the more ads, the higher the tax.
Added benefit: even adults will be less exposed to addictive material.
You get robbed and raped at the local park, broken bones riding a bike, permanent disability playing a sport, drown when swimming, disappear on a hike, overdose at a party, “become violent” playing video games, join a cult at a rock concert, rot your brain watching TV, eating disorders from ballet and gymnastics, traumatic brain injury from a trampoline, choke on a marble, fall when rock climbing, crash your car, get Lyme disease camping, get skin cancer playing outside, develop body dysmorphia playing with a Barbie, socially isolated without Facebook, socially dysfunctional with it, and join a gang if you have nothing else to do.
Everything, from “anything” to “literally nothing”, has been marched up on stage as the latest thing that’s a danger to children. All of it is true. Existing is dangerous, and that cannot be legislated away. Parents are supposed to be preparing their children for the dangers that life brings with it, not grinding down the tips of forks.
Having a healthy fear of skateboarding saved more broken bones than knee pads, so maybe parents should help their children understand that their peer isn’t as cool as they look on Instagram… or they get bombarded with it when they pass the minimum Facebook age and we’re back here in a few years raising the social media age to 35.
It's going to take a lot more evidence to get me anywhere near consideration that this is a trade worth making. Again, we know that fast food can be attributed to hundreds of thousands of early deaths per anum, but we regulate that not at all. In fact it's sadly a staple of the average kids diet.
Passing laws out of fear is not how any competent legislature should operate.
> continuing the status quo with social media is a non starter for humanity. So tell me how we can help kids not get ruined by the internet without a mechanism specifically identifying that they're online
What if I told you it's very simple? We work at banning the harmful dynamics of corporate social media for everyone [0], rather than beating around the bush about kids. In fact, trying to avoid this is exactly why Faceboot et al are lobbying for this age verification crap in the first place - to escape the one tiny avenue of liability that has managed to exist, so they can keep kicking the can down the road.
Given how wholly top-down these proposals all are, frankly they would be better off being referred to as "give control of what your kids can see to the judgement of corporate attorneys.
[0] antitrust enforcement would go a long way here. Faceboot operates on online hosting service, so they should be prohibited from anticompetitively tying the client software used to access it (which necessarily includes "the algorithm").
I would be completely aligned to this proposal if you think the bought and paid for governments of the world would do it and all the influencers out there selling vulnerable demographics pipedreams would accept it without fuss.
There's HUGE demographics of people that would lobby against what you're proposing, sadly.
I don't think bringing in "bought and paid for" makes sense in the context where we're talking about which policies are even sensible. For example if we do assume that, then this identity verification legislation is exactly what is being bought and paid for, and so there is no reason to examine it.
Pragmatically, what I'm saying could hopefully chip away at the surveillance industry's power without a full-on frontal assault. Maybe forcibly breaking up Faceboot and divesting them of their client software is a bit ambitious, but regulation that forces interoperability of third party clients that represent users' interests would seem to be workable.
Algorithmic scroll is factually more harmful, regardless of the amount of harm as long as it's non-zero, because it does affect people. Surveillance on its own doesn't. It just doesn't, everything that you can think of in response is not solely or even significantly caused by surveillance.
Instead, limiting surveillance (which in this case is only linked to the issue at hand with what's explicitly a conspiracy theory, so the link is quite tenuous) was originally meant to limit the government's powers as a form of control over the government. Control over the government is just a part of the Enlightenment project of societies being able to shape their destinies equitably, which includes shaping political arrangements.
Americans have completely lost the ability to shape their political system (when was the last constitutional amendment passed again?), so instead the discourse turned to fetishising particular tools that might help, but were never the point of having freedom. This is a fallacy.
There are straightforward ways to have age verification without descending into a dictatorship. To use an analogy, most European countries have mandatory IDs, some even have digital IDs; many of those counties are freer than the US.
Freedom is being able to stop kids from accessing pornhub without fearing a dictatorship because you can just prevent the dictatorship through a million other means. Freedom is not paralysing the political system as technology and progress (and multi-billion dollar megacorporations) march on.
Otherwise societies just get superficial "freedoms" (like using slurs in public spaces because "free speech") while their governments, say, run a paramilitary murdering political opponents on the street.
"Boobies" really understates what is available virtually unrestricted on Pornhub and similar sites. If "boobies" were the extent of it, far fewer people would be worried about it.
Pornhub is incredibly restrictive about what can be uploaded and about identifying who is uploading the videos and is now also demanding proof of consent from the performers (presumably to avoid revenge porn).
If one of the most compliant actors is already "virtually unrestricted" then you just want to censor things you don't like and the censorship of porn is just a pretense for the things you actually want to censor.
On restricting, I really think that's the responsibility of parents. I think the problem here is that Android and iOS don't empower their users (parents) to implement proper parental controls. I imagine apps don't get the access and maybe the parental controls implemented by the OS don't suffice? Maybe because Android and iOS benefit from these kinds of legislation that cement their duopoly.
I agree that none of the current user platforms, i.e. Android, iOS, nor desktop, have adequate parental controls that are easy to use. Parental controls are important but that's not enough. We expect parents to not buy liquor for their kids, and make reasonable efforts to prevent their kids from obtaining it. But we also expect liquor stores to not sell liquor to kids. We should likewise expect that internet content platforms do not deliver inappropriate content to kids.
Based upon this sentiment, it's already too late as 2Girls1Cup already existed and has done it's damage to the current generation who are obviously deviants!
How can we even trust these lawmakers when Blue Waffles, Tub Girl and Goatsee already existed??!
Unless it hasn't. And while it's grosser than finding a copy of Readers Wives in the park, the "think of the children" angle is overhyped.
> We restrict certain activities and places in the real world from certain people all the time. For example, not allowing people under 18 or 21 (depending on your country) into casinos.
These are not equivalent. Restricting access to a casino just requires showing an ID to a person. A few seconds later and that person has completely forgotten everything about you. They will not keep a record of your home address, etc. Perfectly privacy preserving. You have no such guarantee when you upload government IDs to a server.
I don't think anyone here minds restricting access, but that doesn't require completely destroying ownership rights over our own devices nor internet and device privacy.
All that really needs to be done is for servers to publish what type of content they show from a parental perspective in a machine-readable format and for devices to have parental controls that only allow access to servers that publish such info and which content is allowed by the parental settings.
This should be even more effective than solutions requiring uploading IDs since there's still going to be servers out there in other jurisdictions that simply don't care for such things.
> You have no such guarantee when you upload government IDs to a server.
The problem is that so many people here look at this purely from a USA perspective.
An age check in many European requires no uploading of any ID. It’s an API call toward an ID service, it will tell you which data the service gets access to, and there’s strict regulations and liability around data retention.
I’m not concerned about the government. If they become authoritarian enough to worry, they will impose far tighter surveillance anyway. What we have now is the naive idea that just by not doing ID check, government surveillance is a solved problem in the free democratic world. It’s not. Avoiding ID checks just makes the problem worse because it makes the regular person complacent. The surveillance is implicit and hidden. If we understand that it’s nearly impossible for a non-tech person to avoid being tracked by corporations and governments, then we start working on the things that really help: super tight regulations about what can and can’t be tracked. Requiring audits of large corporations. Solutions that give corporations access to only the data they absolutely need and nothing else (the lack of such things is how we end up by uploading whole ID documents)
> The surveillance is implicit and hidden. If we understand that it’s nearly impossible for a non-tech person to avoid being tracked by corporations and governments, then we start working on the things that really help: super tight regulations about what can and can’t be tracked.
We can't get perfect privacy so we should normalize not having any? Leave it to the government we're distrusting to handle our privacy?
> If they become authoritarian enough to worry, they will impose far tighter surveillance anyway.
What is this logic? Let's not worry about creeping there because if they want it they'll force it? That's not how it works. Getting to a surveillance state needs acceptance. To get that, rather than dropping people in boiling water, you slowly heat the pot, which is what this is.
Just a few decades years ago, everyone's names and phones in the US were freely available to anyone with a phone book. Communications were done in the clear, either via letters (hardly tamper-proof), or via phone (that anyone with access could tap).
Did every American live in a "surveillance state" back then?
Bad analogy. A phone book tells you nothing about who you are talking to or what you are talking about over the phone. Most free countries don't let law enforcement read letters without a warrant. And even in authoritarian states the police couldn't wiretap everyone or read every letter. The volume was simply too massive for any manual operation.
Digitalization and now AI technology changes this drastically because it makes it drastically cheaper to record and flag human communications.
Back then there was only the possibility of listening-in on particulars, and even then people did worry. They weren't fine with that. That's why there's wiretapping laws enacted in the 80s.
Today, and as things continue to progress with speech-recognition, LLMs, video recognition, etc. surveillance can be automated. It's looking conceivable to be able to process all communication population-wide in real-time. That would have been unimaginable back then.
Now, texts and calls today are only a small role of phones. For many people, it's their primary general computing device. It's how they interact with the world. It contains their entire digital life.
Couldn't look at your photo reels and videos, and diary, and every purchase you've ever made, every opinion you've ever said on a public space, every community you've ever interacted with, every location you've ever been in down to the room, from wiretapping a phone in the 80s.
> Some things are exceptionally hard to track now (like e2ee messages) that were trivial to track back then.
Can be easier than back then if stuff like chat-control comes to pass, because now the message can be obtained, processed and stored indefinitely in an automated fashion for everybody at once. E2EE becomes security theater for the most part.
You just said it yourself: the perceived danger of overreach was averted through new laws and control over what the government is doing.
If citizens still have a capacity to restrict the government via (enforced) laws, it doesn't matter much that the communications are in the clear. You can layer something on top just to be sure, but the foundation is laws and a functioning political system.
If there's no functioning political system, the government will just do whatever, like buying the same data they ostensibly can't collect from commercial providers (who weren't restricted from collecting it because there's no US GDPR).
If a country has a functioning political system, it can just do things like ban gun ownership, introduce mandatory IDs, publish everyone's yearly income, or criminalise calling other people slurs in public and not become an uncontrollable dictatorship. If it doesn't, corruption and democratic backsliding will happen regardless. Hyper-focusing on a few tools and superficial traits of a particular system in a particular moment is myopic.
> You just said it yourself: the perceived danger of overreach was averted through new laws and control over what the government is doing. If citizens still have a capacity to restrict the government via (enforced) laws
Restricting the government via laws... The government implements the laws. Trying to restrict the government via laws is mostly just asking "pretty-please don't screw us over." They're not going to make a difference to a corrupt government. Government corruption will become more enticing too because of the added concentration of power it would have. How have laws been working for restricting Trump? He's shown how easily they can be sidestepped and manipulated.
Also, back then implementing end-to-end encryption of all calls wasn't feasible. That would have been the preferred option. It's feasible now. We have it. Why rely on something as fallible as government-restricting laws when we have better options?
It's better for power to be decentralized, as it is with every device owner having sole access to their own devices. As well as being able to communicate anonymously, which is huge for matters of free-speech and democracy.
Indeed, Trump is a great example of democratic backsliding completely unfettered by "freedoms" often mistaken for the actual freedom. The way forward is being able to change things or regaining this ability if it's lost, not trying to carve out some bit that's not under the government's control yet. That's just a form of escapism.
There is a malaise permeating modern culture, where social action does not enter the mind at all, possibly because it does not provide instant results. Collective action and organising local communities has always been the solution to social ills. It's why I'm looking forward to the progressives in US, they seem to be organising themselves quite well.
do parents not control routers and cell plans? I feel like it would be easy to look here for header based solutions. They probably exist tbh. Then just ban your kid from VPNs.
Even so, they likely aren't recording everything your eyes see and for how long they linger. They likely aren't recording your entire traversal through the venue, what you do, what you say, what times you go there, from where you connect, etc. Simply being at a public place is one data point. A full history of your entire interaction is a magnitude different.
> So saying "we should allow unfettered access to the internet" or even "it's the parents' responsibility" is naive, dismissive and has failed.
The market failure to provide an adequate solution wasn't natural. It was engineered by the tech companies and you are playing right into their hands. There is still a way to fix this from the root with software antitrust: force hardware vendors to ship their devices without an operating system.
Here's a more detailed explanation in a past comment about how the problem came to be in the first place, and why software antitrust can solve it:
> So saying "we should allow unfettered access to the internet" or even "it's the parents' responsibility" is naive, dismissive and has failed.
Absolute bullshit. This "unfettered access" is the whole reason why I am who I am today, why I am here. Not only did it not fail, it's in fact so successful it threatens the powers that be, and that's the real reason why they want to ban it.
> I personally believe that the easiest thign to attack is advertising to minors.
Now this I agree with. I would be even more radical. It's not just advertising "to minors", all advertising needs to get banned straight up. Advertising is mind rape. Ban it and all the problems with the web will be fixed literally overnight, including the problems "mandated hardware attestation" aims to solve. There is no need whatsoever for this attestation nonsense.
What you're saying is correct - but it's used to push a much more comprehensive lockdown of devices that has absolutely nothing to do with protection of minors.
It's as if the government first let businesses install slot machines at every street corner, then suddenly went "I'm shocked, shocked! that we have a massive epidemic of gambling addiction here, we have to mandate anti-gambling shock collars for everyone to tackle this urgent problem! There is no alternative!"
This is the slippery slope fallacy and people in tech seem to love this argument. And you can argue in whichever direction you want with it.
For example, "unfettered Internet access is just a series of tubes (shout out to Ted Stevens for that one) for pedophiles to rape your children." So now what? Is it your hyperbole against mine?
The problem is that people are operating under a myth that they have anonymity. You don't. You're one subpoena away from being unmasked online and individuals can do it (eg [1]). When governments do it, they can do it in secret. National Security Letters, pen registers, FISA warrants, etc.
So the idea that "age verification is the first step to a more comprehensive" is flawed in both logical construction (being a fallacy) and that ship has already sailed.
But in this case, the slipping just happened. This thread is about how an app that will be required for using a vast fraction of all websites will require hardware attestation and likely only run on closed, non-rooted mobile OSes. That's not a hypothetical scenario, it's literally what this thread is about.
> I personally believe that the easiest thign to attack is advertising to minors.
Well then, let's regulate this instead? Advertising companies already make a pretty good guess about a person's age. It doesn't require 3rd parties and age verification.
But we won't — this isn't why identity checks are getting lobbied.
> I believe we should shift that liability to advertising.
I am confused. Are you saying that advertising companies should handle these identity checks? So let's just hand out a unique identifier to the companies who have monetary interest in this? Surely this will end well.
>> "We're creating gambling addicts (which is arguably the most harmful form of addiction)"
---
I will need a source, because "arguably" is a very broad umbrella.
"Arguably" heroin addiction is the most harmful addiction because heroin is the most addictive substance, clouds judgement and drives the addict to all manners of sociopathic behaviour (not only theft or prostitition)
One big difference is that heroin is mostly illegal or, if not outright illegal, decriminalized for personal use. Gambling is legal in most places, can be advertised quite freely and restrictions can be easily circumvented with crypto. Crypto casinos have little to no age verification and typically operate extrajudicially (from the victim). Gambling addiction has a high outcome of suicide and tends to leave financial ruin affecting not just that person but their entire family.
Heroin addiction was largely created by the criminialization of cannabis (the first so-called War on Drugs under Nixon) as a tool to persecute black people and war protesters and the overprescription of opioids (eg the Sacklers/Purdue).
That last sentence is neither here not there. I don't think gambling is good; I would have it gone from the internet and reserved to casinos. There is no MORAL justification to push for government control so gambling online can be legal.
Fentanyl is another opioid, like heroin; it also has a very high addictive potential. But, if I am not mistaken, the real problem with fentanyl is that dealers contaminate other drugs with fentanyl, which becomes lethal when not done correctly (and dealers aren't very responsible)
The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Measure of a Man" discusses this topic. Data, an android, is put on trial to determine whether he has personhood, or is merely a machine. One of the best early-season episodes.
I remember having a computer and reading about how the CPU (486) could address up to 4 GB of memory. I thought that was maybe a mistake, since even my hard drive was maybe 100 MB, and I had 16 MB of memory IIRC.
I figured maybe they meant hard drive space (which I could kind of imagine being that large).
"basically NT 3.1" is an incredible over exaggeration. Total RAM capacity has stagnated over the years and subsequent generations of DDR have backed speed instead.
8GB in a computer was considered good in a consumer performance machine in 2010. 16 years before that was 6-8MB.
I agree that the time periods you mention saw different growth patterns and I would blame the stagnant software for the situation —it has slowly grown into the hardware with no real feature improvement.
Even the current path to exponential RAM increases is a naked king —1T models are only slightly better than 1B models at following instructions.
The baseline in the past was that your program ran on bare metal or in the windowing system being written in assembly or C/Pascal. Nowadays your program runs in the browser which runs in the Windowing system, your program being written in 20 levels deep JS abstractions.
What to expect when the culture is to deliver Electron crap as "native" apps?
The other day I heard on a podcast a guy complaining how hard it was to do backend software in terms of performance, his tooling? Node.js.
Naturally when even Microsoft gets these folks as coders that is what we get, Webview2 all over the place on basic OS, C or C++ code that barely works.
Because as we all know, even if a claim holds in 99.999% of cases, all you have to do is point out the 0.001% extreme outlier cases where it didn't hold true, to completely invalidate the entire claim.
If you claim that something only moves in one direction, then one counterexample is enough to invalidate that claim. If you say in 99.999% of cases something only moves in one direction, then that claim can be invalidated by showing that either more or less of cases result as claimed... Isn't that straightforward thinking?
I seriously doubt that 99.999% of all toll roads are "ratchets" that only move in one direction, i.e. have never had the tolls lowered or removed, only increased. Examples of tolls being lowered and removed are also not extreme outliers it's one of the possible directions in which a toll's price can move and everyone and their aunt, but maybe not their dad, knows that.
Because England is very old it has a whole bunch of things which did charge a toll and then that expired, so, nope.
It does also have situations where people go "Hey, this toll bridge was built 50 years ago, surely the tolls should be abolished" and the people who built the bridge are like "Nope. See, here's the press about it 50 years ago saying what a great idea it is to have the tolls be slightly lower but perpetual". Feel free to build a time machine and go tell your past selves that's not a great idea after all.
But well, nothing is forever. In five hundred years that perpetual toll on a road is obsolete because hardly anybody owns a private vehicle so the toll mostly just moves (local) government money from one pile (funding transport) to another (build infrastructure) and it's not a very efficient way to do that. Or the bridge falls down and its replacement doesn't have a toll because people were sick of tolls. Nothing is forever.
In my part of the United States, the state government authorized the construction of toll roads with an agreement that those roads would eventually be handed over to the state government once the projects have been paid off.
That being said, the toll roads keep expanding so that they can continue to be operated by the private company that built them.
This is an arrangement the state government is quite happy with, because they do not have to budget for the maintenance of those roads and they are able to collect taxes on the revenue collected by the toll authority. Converting those toll roads would cause a spike in expenditures and a drop in tax revenue.
Therefore, there is a perverse incentive on both sides to keep the toll roads from being converted into public ones.
I have no idea if this sort of thing was prevalent in the past, especially in the UK. But I wanted to chime in about why several toll roads that were supposed to be paid off thirty years ago are still going strong. I suspect that 500+ years ago “build toll road, hand toll road to the public” was a lot more straightforward.
The Forth Road Bridge stopped having tolls in 2008 and was effectively replaced more recently by a new bridge, the Queensferry Crossing, that has never had tolls.
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