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by cookiecaper 2375 days ago
One of the positives of DNS-level blocking is that it's relatively rough-grained. You can block pornhub.com, but you can't block out every mention of homosexuality at the DNS level without blocking any site that may potentially mention it, which would include any news site, discussion forum, social media, etc.

We should be skeptical of aggresively-enforced DoH. In most cases, the vendor's interest in stopping ad blockers is stronger than their interest in protecting user privacy. Mozilla is slightly more removed, but as they're dependent on The Big G for revenue, we're basically just waiting for that shoe to drop.

2 comments

Technology should not be inserting itself into the private lives of people and determining the values they can raise their children with. This is something parents should have as a tool. If you don't like it, tough; go raise your kids the way you want to. There's no reason why someone with traditional values shouldn't be afforded the ability to selectively block things they find obscene.
Nobody is fighting over whether you're going to be doing site-by-site blocking, because that's too exhausting and people know that.

That's why companies have to exercise moral taste when they do a blanket ban on moral obscenity, and that's precisely the kind of product that people mean to purchase -- curation and tastefulness. It's also why it's interesting for people to fight over this, because they're fighting over a policy of scale as opposed to what goes on in one single home.

And presumably this company would later be interested in dealing with schools and other big institutions, which means their product takes on yet another critical dimension, which is the re-allocation of responsibility for making morally tasteful decisions.

In both B2C and B2B, the refusal to exercise moral perspective, taste, and curation is missing the soul of the product. But of course not all areas of tech is for everyone; some people don't wish to work with advertising companies, and that's fine too, but advertising companies likewise make policies of scale and must exercise moral and political taste.

Yes, so one should expect that religious sites describing the healthy mode of heterosexuality should remain visible, while sites discussing homosexual parenting ought be stricken via DNS. Is the positive you're talking about summed up as "it's not that bad"?
It's well within any parent's rights to block content like that, yes. If I can prevent my children from seeing obscene and objectionable things until they're old enough to have reasonable conversations about it, I will.

That doesn't mean I want to raise bigots, it just means I want to do what I can to ensure the narratives being pushed on my children are wholesome ones that will help them to grow up to be useful, contributing members of society and parents as well.

Maybe you don't care about that for your own kids; that's on you, champ. I'm not arguing for anything censoring anyone else, or anyone censoring what any adult reads.