• 3 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • to anyone who wants to argue about how language changes and how words get retired and if we retire this word another will come along: First of all, I don’t believe you in this case. In the past 10-15 years, the word has fallen off in use, and the words that replaced it weren’t offensive in the same way.

    I don’t understand why you think this argument, which I’ve heard described as the Euphemism Treadmill, doesn’t apply to this word. Retard is used to describe the slowing of something, like fire, without any insult to people. It’s just a word. As you point out, that word can be, and is, used as an insult which causes harm. However, any word can do that. Take “slow”, which I used above as an example. If it became the new slang insult for people of below average intelligence would you ask that people stop using it? It sounds silly to think of today, but that’s just because we aren’t used to hearing it that way. There’s nothing stopping a new word from taking the place of an old one, and retarded is not special. I guarantee you if people used it to laugh at others or said it sharply it would become just as hurtful.

    We used to call people without jobs or shelter bums, then homeless, then housless, now temporarily unhoused. Once everyone is saying temporarily unhoused what will the next word be?

    We’re absolutely in agreement that slower people are people too and deserve to be treated with respect. However, the fact that intelligence is a sought after trait that you are ridiculed for not having is the root of the problem, not the word used, and I don’t think this word has some special ability to get around the euphemism treadmill.


  • I’ll agree that their mobile experience is not great, they don’t support tablet layouts for example, but it still has the best support for ad blocking. I consider that essential for the modern internet.

    My big concern is that we’re repeating the Internet Explorer issue all over again, where the web is coded for it instead of standards. Now Google has the ability to strong arm the Internet by not adopting standards, pushing their preferences, etc. Web sites are being coded coded to run on better on Blink than Gecko so it gets worse all the time. If we give up on Mozilla the Internet will fall even further into the hands of big tech.







  • While no system is perfect, technology has improved a lot since you were a kid.

    For one, like it or not, many phones no longer allow custom ROMs or tampering. But even that aside, network inspection takes way less processing power now so a basic gateway can now handle dynamic block lists, DNS filtering, VPN detection, etc. If properly implemented it could ensure your parent’s use a password with good complexity and require MFA in order to turn it off.

    Now, circumvention techniques have improved as well, but cheap cryptography really changes things and it can be used to make a very secure system. I think this is where our effort should be focused, on making sure ISP provided hardware has these options available to parents. It makes much more sense than trying to force this on all endpoints.








  • It’s not on you to know every single website and what it does. All major security providers maintain a classification database of websites that they use to filter the internet. Most major corporations subscribe to those lists, as do schools (I think by law). All you would do is buy one of these services and the blacklist would be managed by them. They’re not 100% perfect, and you child will be able to find a picture of boobs if they try hard enough, but that has always been the case.

    One quick and easy way is to change your DNS to 1.1.1.3, which is a public resolver Cloudflare runs which filters out adult domains. This doesn’t scale if you’ve given your child a cellular device that can connect to other networks, but in that case you shouldn’t have done that, or should secure that device with a security solution that can enforce polices across the OS.

    Personally I think it should be easier for parents to be able to do this kind of thing without having to learn too much about the tech, but deciding how to raise your child and what to shelter them from is your responsibility. These products have existed for decades. Instead of forcing OS manufactures to confirm ages and identities, we should focus on making sure parents have access to easy to use parental controls.