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EU age verification app announced to protect children online (www.dw.com)
submitted 5 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 1 point 5 months ago (3 children)

How would they do such a thing? Require every open port on every internet connected device to be registered? Disallow https and implement full scale layer 7 scanning?

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (2 children)

    No, they will expand the mandates for providers to filter traffic. Everything ultimately goes through a handful of big ISP companies, so they will just make them comply with the filtration. It will not work great, even simple DPI is resource intensive, but when an ISP is ultimately at fault, they will have to find a way. And ultimately it doesn't have to work all the time forever, it just need to degrade services enough so most people find it inconvenient to use. As a tool of control, it needs to prevent unwanted communication to be easy, this will ensure only the nerds will do it, and nobody cares about handful of nerds.
    They don't have to invent anything, that's exactly how it works already in every country that controls their population and the internet in their country. It took Russia 8 years to transition from completely free unobstructed internet to everything being unavailable and everyone being used to it. Europe is way more capable technically, it will take most of the countries less.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    It is possible but doesn't sound all that realistic to me. A truly decentralized app cannot be blocked by dns or endpoints. Thus a country would have to DPI the entire internet which is very resource intensive. And even then the data will be encrypted so you would have to resort to fingerprinting and finding patterns. From an age verification app to automatic data blocking based on deep packet inspection with fingerprinting of the entire internet - that seems quite a leap. Personally I don't think decentralized apps are next in line to be blocked.

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  • [–] 0 points 4 months ago*

    You'd be surprised how easy it is to ban specific protocols or apps, if you put your mind to it. DPI is dead easy this days. Again, Russian example is right there, the only thing that managed to resist the block so far was Telegram, because they're doing some very advanced block avoidance. Russia is poor, and losing brains very quickly, a country with better equipment and people will not have this problem.
    Yeah, it's resource intensive, but that's ISP's job, and they have equipment and motivation already. Small ISPs if they still exist will die, but that's just added bonus. And you don't even need the complete blockage, you need to make it annoying enough to use so it's not very popular, so most of the communication will happen on platforms that are under control. You can't fight all the nerds, and you don't need to.
    It's not a leap, it's the only next logical step. A government doesn't start carding everyone on the internet because they're bored. They do it because they don't want uncontrolled communication for some reason or another. "For the children", of course, why else. That's why everyone needs to have an ID app on their phone, and all the websites should be tied to it. It's for the children.

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