How do you plan to survive digital ID and government mandated enshittification?

tyl

Well I wrote the rest a few weeks ago and debated posting it in its current state, but now the very first site was named that'll be complying with upcoming EU age verification (it doesn't even exist yet as of right now) and can you guess what it is? Nexus Mods. Yes that's right that's not a joke, its not a porn site, its not Twitter but a fucking game modding site? Seriously? I'm kinda checked out from most of the modern/mainstream web so I was at least hoping yeah Discord/Twitter/Reddit/YouTube is gonna be the main focus and they'll settle for just censoring most of popular sources of information people use instead of going all out and its like I either don't use these to begin with or they'll be easy enough to bypass or whatever right, but if they're going after Nexus Mods of all places (am I underestimating Nexus' popularity? Surely its not anywhere near comparable to social media) it has to be asked what is safe? Pretty much nothing. Contrary to popular belief it seems like governments are not incompetent or out of touch when it comes to the internet anymore, its not the same like old moral panics anymore where boomers find out about online porn and want to sue the first company whos page they heard of, they do actually know what they're doing and they're hell bent on making sure you don't ever get to see anything they wanna censor no matter which random corner of the internet its in or how niche it is, today its NSFW and any differing political opinions, tomorrow it can be anything and depending on how far they go, if you've already got your own copy, you're a criminal and yes they will prosecute like they do in Germany/UK for any nonallowed political options.

How are you coping with the fact most of the world turned to a totalitarian surveillancestate almost overnight? How are you preparing to go with severely restricted or no internet? Do we have anyone here from China to give some tips on how to get by?
I've been downloading stuff for years, but its still far from everything I'd want to keep and even if I achieved that, not being able to get anything new or talk to people sucks.
Stop killing games won, thats great but its like the EU too is gonna hold the digital libraries like everything else online hostage unless you dox yourself so does it even matter? Pirating games sucks bad, losing access to Steam, losing that money (not like most money isn't fake nowdays anyways that payment processors and banks can just keep for themselves anytime for any/no reason), its fucked up.

Source: https://www.nexusmods.com/news/15319

Original:
Hope its fine to post this here, I assume many people here aren't really interested to begin with in politics and such things, I for sure am not but some things are better not ignored until last minute when they will have major effects on the internet. A lot of things happened recently in like the past 2 months on how much more government enforced censorship and surveillance is coming to the internet around the world in the near future and I find it extremely concerning to say the least.

Normalization of government internet censorship and surveillance with porn bans excuse as a start, there have been a few examples of this recently, in certain US states, the UK, Australia, France and the whole EU. Personally I wouldn't even care if they just tried to sue or shut down or whatever the top porn sites that they always love using in examples, but thats the point, this is just an excuse to normalize total government control of the internet, its not about porn or whatever other excuse they may come up with in the future, Discord for example is already testing harvesting IDs in the UK and Australia, it is just a matter of time before it becomes easier for them to roll it out globally and just make it mandatory for signup not just NSFW channels. This is due to the UKs recent laws that just went into effect like a month ago, many independent sites hosted in the UK that don't even have any NSFW content have shut down simply because they can not risk the high fines they'll get just in case a few bad actors spam their forums for example (I would expect such attacks to increase, why DDOS a site or mass report it to a hosting providers when you can just spam porn on it and then report it to the government for not being complaint and they'll get a multi million pound fine) I've heard some other smaller sites based elsewhere complying with the UK regulation too.
Some states in the US already have implemented and others are currently planning to implement outright porn bans, age verification requirements even onto platforms like Twitter/Reddit/Discord (and obviously after they comply they can go after smaller sites) or to expand the definitions so far that even some SFW anime may get you in serious legal trouble.
Just today I find out the EU is trying to do this too and is rolling out a digital ID phone app that they want sites to use, so basically the government will see and decide what websites you're allowed on. They're not even doing a good job at hiding this behind the porn excuse when they openly talk about wanting to ban Twitter or TikTok, they'll go after everything if even the biggest sites who will always comply and censor on demand (which they've been doing for years) are not safe despite going along with all their wishes.
Pornhub advocates that all phones and PCs should basically have hardware based DRM and enforce like age gating device wide, they promote some no-name organization thats asking for Google/Apple/Microsoft accounts to be ID verified to enforce this on the whole web. Obviously in a future like this old OSes and non-big tech systems would be basically blocked from most of the internet. You may already feel this, like for the past week I've been getting capchad every single time I open a YT video, even with cookies on, even if I change IP (in the past some VPN IPs were banned while most worked fine), if you're not running stock Chrome on Windows with no VPN big sites are already trying to blacklist you. Now the enshittification is law with severe punishments behind it to make sure everyone who hasn't yet complies too.

Some sources:
https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/30326565624343-How-to-Verify-Age-Group
https://nichegamer.com/gop-texas-bill-could-jail-you-for-owning-or-watching-goblin-slayer-and-more/
https://nichegamer.com/republican-senator-introduces-bill-to-define-obscenity-may-pose-risk-to-video-games-and-anime/
https://reason.com/2025/05/12/republicans-want-to-redefine-obscenity/
https://www.pymnts.com/mobile-applications/2025/european-union-launch-age-verification-app-online-use-july/

Doc

tyl How are you coping with the fact most of the world turned to a totalitarian surveillancestate almost overnight? How are you preparing to go with severely restricted or no internet?

I'm finding more ways to get around this, or I'll simply not use anything that requires me to give ID. I'll probably just stick to using chan sites for now. Nearly all social media doesn't seem fun to me anymore, and the few that I do use would be better not taking up my time. I do not welcome being forced to give ID to use the internet, but I can see a small silver lining in it.
I would be perfectly fine with a severely restricted internet because what isn't restricted would be a lot more free than how things are now. There is too much censorship from everything and I wouldn't want to voice my true thoughts if a sword was hanging above my head all the time. It also would mean that people would gravitate more towards personal blogs or forums, which I would be happy about. There is also plenty of ways to get around hosting porn and whatnot on those sites. It would be something like not posting things directly on the blog, instead you would use a torrent or mailing list for what you are trying to give. You could even use a messaging app depending on how big the files are.
The ingenuity of people is great, and they will always find ways around the government. Use that to your advantage. If you haven't already learn how to use Tor, and other darknet services. There are multiple ones out there, although Tor is the biggest one.

tyl

Doc I was somewhat naive enough to hope that they would just go after social media, like look at the App Store charts and go after the top 100 and leave it at that, obviously thats beyond stupid, anyone would know that who has paid the tiniest attention to internet censorship during the past decade, it only ever increases, it never decreases or stays the same for too long. UK/EU are looking to ban end to end encryption so there goes your messenger idea, torrents obviously bad idea, they've been tracking and prosecuting its use in many countries for a long time.
Twitter used the CP detection algorithm to suppress accurate news that went against certain political interests, iOS and Android looks through all your photos, advertises that fact they read your messages and listen to your calls, ofc aside tracking all your app activity, all your IRL activity with GPS and 500 other sensors. The only reason this is not enforced on PC is bc PC use among the general public must be significantly lower than I imagine, PCs are just for business now, normal people don't have them anymore, no point to waste time on them (not that Apple and Microsoft won't bring it to PC anyways to provide a "cross-platform experience")
This is why I fully believe it'll be even worse than I could predict, because even people who are against it (which isn't many nowdays) are underestimating it or not taking it seriously, well the governments are taking it seriously. They'll go after everything as should prove Nexus or search engines in australia requiring ID.

Aero YouTube will be the first to go, anything on the EU "Very Large Online Platform" list is guaranteed to go first, I guess good thing nothing aside is YT is worth using from there but that is besides the point, well I would've said that before it was announced as Nexus Mods of all things but obviously every single big tech company will do it, in fact many already do like YT already been asking for ID for ages to watch age restricted videos, it takes them one click to deploy it site wide, they want to do it anyways and doing it along with a government mandate is the perfect chance to also dodge some criticism with the "we really didn't want to do it but we're forced to!". The reason there will be workarounds is because there's no real technical way I can think of where they could DRM the entire Internet Protocol to prevent anyone from even running their own site, so that I do not think will happen but every single site where they can track down some sort of ownership will be threatened until they comply and those who they can't find will be blocked by ISPs worldwide and VPNs will be useless when every country has these exact same laws.

Lumeinshin It's hopeless, people already submit their ID to discord because its required to appeal bans, and to view NSFW in the UK and Australia, they could just literally download a free VPN and make a new account, way easier, faster, convenient, etc , you'd imagine its such a no brainer than doxing yourself to an advertising company and risking identity theft yet barely anyone actually does that. People are way too brainwashed.
VPN will be useless once sooner or later all countries adopt these laws, basically all of the relevant powerful countries are planning this, any that somehow don't will not matter because it will become the standard and sites will just require it for everyone just like they do phones and ban VPN users already.
If I was you I would be prepared for the email from ofcom, if they can find you just voluntarily block the UK, if they can't tell them to stuff it and let them block it, end result is the same.

Yes there will be ways around it but they'll be hunted like dark net drug marketplaces and worse are currently, we sure we're ready to deal with that?

Aero

I think I'd be able to dodge compliant sites unless they hit youtube or made it compulsory to verify to access the internet. At that point I might cave in

Lumeinshin

There isn't too much that can be done in a lot of cases except changing the way that you interact with the Internet.

Depending on events in your country you can get more involved politically, emailing/sending letters to members of your respective parliament.
It's tough, as the Internet has changed in the past 15 years its users have congregated on less platforms, inflating them but also making it harder to move people off. If you've ever tried getting a friend group off Discord you'll know the exact pain. (Ironic given i'm sure many of us were the ones advocating to switch from say Skype to Discord 10 years ago)

You'll have to segment off your online identities and have some version of yourself that is 'tracked', if only to avoid a harsher spotlight coming down on you.

A VPN will be necessary to access certain sites, especially if for example they blacklist your EU/UK IP. I would suggest some stockpile of monero so that you can pay for a VPN in the event of further crackdowns.

With this website as an example, I will always do my best to stick to my personal ideals/principles but its also not immune to the long arms of the government. Obscurity serves us well so far in that regard.

Open source is a godsend for a lot of these things, the crackdowns and general surveilance industry can be overcome somewhat by replacing as many services with self hosted or open source alternatives where possible.

Other usual points too ofc, cash is king and all that jazz.

Aero

tyl I'm sorry but I'm having a stroke reading your post

Doc

tyl UK/EU are looking to ban end to end encryption so there goes your messenger idea, torrents obviously bad idea, they've been tracking and prosecuting its use in many countries for a long time.

I have very big reservations as to how they will ban end to end encryption when there are so many ways to do it, and ways to get the software to do it too.
As for the torrents idea, It would be very hard to keep track of every torrent to find out if it is porn or whatever. You could name it something innocent and have it fly under the radar, or you can be on a private tracker. Some level of exclusivity would deter most of governments unless they have a good idea of where to look and for what. Not only that, but you can have it be in a different country where they can't shut down the torrent.

tyl iOS and Android looks through all your photos, advertises that fact they read your messages and listen to your calls, ofc aside tracking all your app activity, all your IRL activity with GPS and 500 other sensors.

With that you can either change phones away from Apple, or get Android ones and get a custom OS on them. There are plenty of different ones, and they aren't that hard to do. Of course the hardware could still be bugged. For that you would need to get a phone that is like a dumbphone, or something like the pinephone. It would be fairly annoying at first, but better to have that than something horribly bugged.

I might just be optimistic. I think if the Chinese can get around the great firewall even with all of their spying any other country will be able to do the same. The techniques would be shared in person over flashdrives or something. At the worst people would start doing old dead drops or giving out messages and things in encrypted hardware to keep out the government eyes. I know I would if everything on the internet needed to have my ID.

tyl

Doc Obviously they can't technically block everything thats not what I'm saying.
From what I know in China the reason people can get around the firewall is because they literally just don't care enough to enforce it, so if 1/2% are doing it whatever, not because they wouldn't have the ability to enforce it more effectively if they wanted to. Depending on how bad it gets they will absolutely be able to enforce it, and it doesn't have to be on a technical level, authorities can just take your phone on the street randomly like in russia and look through it if you have some wrongthink on it, why couldn't they pay you a visit at home if you have some encrypted traffic on your network thats not on the whitelist? Already happens in UK and Germany and other places with social media posts but its not like your ISP doesn't know you and govs don't have access to their systems.
What is technically preventing them from go as far as they want? Nothing anymore from what I'm seeing, mass surveillance is not looked at as something disgusting or wrong in the west infact its seen as necessary and good, there is no public backlash, there are no powerful groups/lobbyists/politicians/whatever pushing against it (this is how you know that most other issues are made up distractions, this one is one of the few real goals when every politician across the world agrees on something for once), there is no mass non-compliance, there is absolutely nothing that would stop it from getting way worse than I could imagine.

Ross_R

tyl authorities can just take your phone on the street randomly like in russia

Frankly, this started to happen in other countries way earlier.
Here's, for example, an article about the matter from US from 2012 that claims that police do this routinely during traffic stops, among other things: https://www.aclu.org/news/national-security/keeping-government-out-your-smartphone
In Russia, first report I heard about such an instance only happened in 2022, once the offensive on the Ukraine started. And this doesn't surprise me: Russia in general has 5-10 years lag behind the rest of the world ever since Stalin purged half of the country's IQ. Most people around here are barbarians when it comes to tech. Law enforcement positions do not pay nearly enough to attract tech-savvy lot - they prefer different areas.
I mean, check this example. There was a prison in this country where brutal torture, including waterboaring, rape and the rest of stuff was widespread. The law also made videos of the tortures, so they could blackmail prisoners and whatnot. Thing is, the law didn't have no one to work the computers and maintain video database, and therefore they... unofficially employed one of the prisoners. Except they didn't pay him and, as some news outlets say, even kept torturing him as well.
Unsurprisingly, several years later the prisoner who worked the computers made huge database of all the videos public.
All I want to say is that Russia might sound scary, but when it comes to tech, law is both stupid and blind here. That being said...
They are usually not that smart in other countries either. I do not feel threatened by the UK/EU age verification much. I mean, just how hard it can be to circumvent it? Chances are, it can be bypassed by a single script.
Or just use proxy with an IP outside of EU. Overall, really, just stockpile different proxies, and you'll be safe unless your country will decide to pull the plug on the internet altogether.
And "hardware-based DRM that enforces age gating device wide" is the dumbest idea I have heard altogether. How does that even suppose to work? Why wouldn't you be able to hack that, jailbreak it like XBox 360 or something?

Doc

tyl What is technically preventing them from go as far as they want?

Well in the USA the people are what prevent them. We still have threats of violence when politicians go too far. And like you mentioned, there is no technical limitations as to what they can do, but there is limitations on how much man power they are willing to use for enforcement. As methods of getting around their privacy invasion get harder to detect, they will be less inclined to go after people. Man power would be better used some other place rather than jailing someone who posts memes against the government. That is of course unless your government hates the population like in the UK and would rather let major crimes go and focus on smaller crimes.

tyl mass surveillance is not looked at as something disgusting or wrong in the west infact its seen as necessary and good, there is no public backlash, there are no powerful groups/lobbyists/politicians/whatever pushing against it

I have seen and known many people pushing against mass surveillance. Snowden is a huge example. Others actively take the piss out of politicians for supporting bills that invade privacy, and those where it has happened to them talk about it constantly. People are not super vocal about it until you ask them, then it all comes out.

tyl

Ross_R Unsurprisingly, several years later the prisoner who worked the computers made huge database of all the videos public.
All I want to say is that Russia might sound scary, but when it comes to tech, law is both stupid and blind here. That being said...

Is that supposed to make it better? Yeah we know the abuses are happening, talking about it here right now, does that stop them, or decrease their severity or how does that help? Have there been any consequences? Probably not, there never are any. I'm pretty sure people in north korea too know that they're being oppressed, does that actually improve their situation at all? Theres never any backlash or change or at least not anymore.

Ross_R They are usually not that smart in other countries either. I do not feel threatened by the UK/EU age verification much. I mean, just how hard it can be to circumvent it? Chances are, it can be bypassed by a single script.
Or just use proxy with an IP outside of EU. Overall, really, just stockpile different proxies, and you'll be safe unless your country will decide to pull the plug on the internet altogether.
And "hardware-based DRM that enforces age gating device wide" is the dumbest idea I have heard altogether. How does that even suppose to work? Why wouldn't you be able to hack that, jailbreak it like XBox 360 or something?

Yeah with the exception that even if you do bypass it and even if it was easy you're a criminal now, and not with a fine for breaching contract terms of copyright with some random company which also most internet users have done the same actually making it unfeasible to go after 99% of them, but you'll be facing long sentences for tricking government verification services, bypassing "child protection systems" and such. Personally, for the sake of the argument, if I had to get in legal trouble I'd prefer it be the first scenario 100 times out of a 100.

The Xbox 360 came out at a time when all internet traffic was unencrypted, barely a few years after you could just click Cancel on the Windows login screen to bypass the password, it had really good security for the time, why always skip over the Xbox One? 13 years old and still unhacked, the power of always online DRM, and 50 virtual machines behind custom hardware. "There is no demand for it, it has no games, excuses upon excuses" part of the problem, had it came out 20 years ago it would've been hacked even with 0 games released just cause, that was the mindset back then, now people can't be fucked to do anything, in fact they outright hate freedom, think its harmful and needs to be restricted, they love DRM and surveillance now, think it benefits them.
More importantly at a time when people actually valuing freedom more was at its peak (during recent history at least and especially compared to today).
Everything got hacked and broken and every rule disobeyed then especially online just cause, jailbreaking was basically normal for many iOS users in the early years, it was the norm for people to not want to put up with bs restrictions, whens the last time you've heard anyone jailbreak? Go on the most tech savvy android board you think you know right now thats not completely underground (I refuse to believe they would exist as android became so locked down I have absolutely no idea how anyone could still consider it usable who has been using it from the start for its openness) and see what they think about rooting or custom ROMs today, everyone is bitching about their money cloud storage apps banning them, you would've been laughed out immediately for even bringing up something that stupid 15 years ago yet now its the overwhelming majority opinion of (modern) "tech enthusiasts". Even regular people used to think in their early years that mobile phones will be used for surveillance, the government doesn't have their best interest in mind, and now "tech enthusiasts" are among the biggest defenders of big tech, banks, government overreach, you name it.

I know it can be hard to get this because I've struggled with understanding this for years too and I still absolutely hate how things have gotten to this point, I don't really understand why either honestly and I don't think I ever will but lying to myself that the shift has not happened would be counterproductive. It did, I hate it, but I have to work within that, alone, because the "everybody torrents they can't catch us all even if they wanted to" is just not true anymore, and I think those who still operate with that mindset will be in for a rude awakening sooner or later.

Nah Maybe its my bad for not properly explaining it, yeah chinese have the tools to go on the global internet, sure. Maybe my question shouldn't have been along the lines of "how will I have the ability to occasionally go on indie sites/watch porn/freely express opinions in a tiny bubble where its allowed/etc" which sure people in china do, but rather how will I keep my current lifestyle. I do not want personal social media, I do not want a "personal smartphone" (I have a smartphone for me, like a PC, not others, not as a form of human DRM, same concept as socials, Ill deal with a burner twitter to follow some artists or whatever, but ill never put my name on there or have a facebook with my family on it or even think about the possibility of being asked for it and denied at the border because I didn't suck off the current president hard enough as that is something that happens today apparently in "free liberal democracies"), I do not want whatsapp, I do not want to use digital payments, I never want to be bothered everywhere to install some software or register on some site to do something extremely basic, I already don't care about all of this bullshit even before it was enforced though tech and that was just fine give me the weird looks and fuck off and we can both go about our day, but don't try the best to starve me unless I submit to all this garbage.
Sure you can use a proxy in china but can't not have a smartphone and wechat and alipay and spend significant effort to fit in to avoid anyone finding out and ratting you out. That must be hell living like that.
Maybe few will get this but oh well, like the normies that are everywhere that go on 4chan (or on here too, they even admit it) and think they found some cool elite internet club so they can steal some memes and brag about it on instagram and farm engagement and ad revenue.

Nah

The good news is that anti censorship tools are widely available and sophisticated enough to bypass most tools that governments use. Even simply using a VPN to tunnel into a country with free internet would be a viable strategy to bypass many of these regulations.

We also have the Chinese people who made bypassing censorship tech a national pastime on our side. I'm not that tech literate but from what I know the Chinese government under Xi actually does make an effort to shut down non-corporate VPN traffic and the tools being used now are proxies that mask illegal traffic as legal traffic.

You can check some of these tools being used. The big project being used are v2ray and singbox which are proxy software that use different protocols to mask traffic.

My only concern is if the US or EU "export" their regulations worldwide in which I guess we'll need to find small alternative sites for our browsing and live like it's 2003.

Ross_R

tyl Is that supposed to make it better? Yeah we know the abuses are happening, talking about it here right now, does that stop them, or decrease their severity or how does that help?

What? I don't get it. You created this thread in hopes to change the world somehow? Of course my replies won't make it better. I doubt anyone's will.
If anything, the intention of my reply was to make a point that it is not that bad in Russia, and it is probably worse in US as is, therefore I was just not sure why you brought up Russia as an example in one of your posts, when simialr practices existed in US way before Russia, and it is US and EU who are about to enforce some kind of vague age confirmation technics on their online users in the first place.
I can give you only one practical advice, here and now: throw away your smartphone and buy an old used phone with buttons, today. My life became better ever since I bought myself an N-Gage.

tyl why always skip over the Xbox One? 13 years old and still unhacked, the power of always online DRM, and 50 virtual machines behind custom hardware. "There is no demand for it, it has no games, excuses upon excuses" part of the problem, had it came out 20 years ago it would've been hacked even with 0 games released just cause, that was the mindset back then

Err... No? There never was a console that has been hacked "just cause". Show me an example, if you know one, but I think you are making a mistake. Because, really, people who make hacks professionally earn money, decent money. Unless it is a software exploit, and those are rare. But hardware exploits mean that you have to buy hardware, and that means hackers can sell hardware. Piracy is a business; always was since hackers made pirated Game Boy cartridges and whole off-brand Sega consoles - they didn't give those away for free at the corners. All in all, very few release groups and hackers do it "just cause". Even people who hack and repack video games nowadays usually get money, one way or another.
So yes, XOne is truly only unhacked because nobody really cares. Micros did introduce a way to launch homebrewed code on legal firmware, thus reducing the interest of hacking the console greatly. Vast amount of games is available on Windows; the amount of XOne exclusives is next to zero, and the amount of good ones is probably less than zero. It's much like PSVita, which hasn't been hacked until what, 2022, ten years after the release? Not because it was that hard, but because people were busy hacking other things, and no one cared about Vita.
I was the first guy in the world who made meaningful edits in the code of MotorStorm and Just Cause, more than ten years after the release of every of said games. Do you think if was exceptionally hard and I'm a genius? Yeah, I didn't think so. And that's the truth: I was the first simply because everyone else who had skills was busy with other things all these years, and I just happen to like to skim through the digital junkyard for free.
And needless to say, the interest to hack potential hardware age-restricting DRM would be very high. Political, even. Professional chinese, russian and other hackers might have an interest to see it hacked just to disrupt the efforts of their political enemies, which increase the chance of hack in magnitudes.
Besides, a good amount of XBox One protection comes from constant firmware updates. They roll out an update once a month, and a lot of people update their consoles ASAP, since without the latest firmware you cannot access Micro$oft Store and other online features. Combined with a lack of interest, no one really has a time to explore every firmware that exists.
So, while a lot of ~~idiots~~ people cannot live without online gaming, I cannot see a system like that working on... Wait, where even "hardware-based DRM" is supposed to be? Is it a part of GPU? CPU? Disk drives? Special "confirm-your-age" device that takes a separate PCI-e slot?
How that will even work? You will have to buy you GPU with a passport? What prevents your father/brother/friend buy a GPU for you?
All in all, an existance of hardware DRM raises so many questions, that I'd call it bollocks from the start.
There were several exploits every now and then, albeit none of them really came to fruition. The latest exploit came in 2024.

tyl in fact they outright hate freedom, think its harmful and needs to be restricted, they love DRM and surveillance now, think it benefits them.

I think you are over-reacting. As much as I hate normies' mindset, my experience tells me that they do not hate freedom. Every time I bring up this talk - like, cameras everywhere, your phone listens to you - I get responses like "yeah, but we are no one either way", "we can't do anything about it, so we just have to live the way it is", "you're thinking about the whole world when you only gotta think for yourself" and so on. In other words, they are as depressed about the matter as any other man, but they love their comfortable lives way too much to anyhow actively resist the surveillance. The idea to leave smartphone at home is unthinkable to any of those guys. Either because they gotta have their dose of the web and they do not care about freedoms, or because their relatives are hooked and cannot use anything but whatever messenger of their choice, or because the job mandates so... They always have an excuse.
People do not hate freedom, but they do not have any desire to fight, to put their lives into bad, uncomfortable situations. And that's the greates trick of the modern world: the golden cages are here, and as much as people hate the cage, they also love the gold; the comfort they live in.
That's what I get from the talks around my country, at least.

tyl whens the last time you've heard anyone jailbreak?

Actually... rather lot in recent few years. Since I am in Russia and a lot of countries banned us, peeps jailbroke a lot of stuff. They use hacked Spotify and Instagram apps on their jailbroken phones, they bypass Steam restrictions to buy games...
Now, it is beyond my fucking reason that people actually bypass restrictions to spend their money on Steam, but, as I said aboce regarding XBox, most of them can't live without online games, and so fools will go through extra harships just to give more money to Gabe. It is also beyond my mind that people rather go through the trouble of hacking Spotify rather than actually use this moment to start their own offline collection, but I guess at this point you have to break their phones with a hammer in order to make some meaningful change. As I said, people just love their golden cages so much, they are actually more willing to fight in order to stay inside, rather than to make a step outside.
You know, I guess, I can see where you get the idea that people hate freedom, yeah... But I still think this is not the case. They just like comfort too much.

tyl Go on the most tech savvy android board you think you know right now thats not completely underground ... and see what they think about rooting or custom ROMs today, everyone is bitching about their money cloud storage apps banning them

I think you are visiting wrong tech-savvy places.
Also, I think most tech-savvy places are underground even if they do not want to be underground. If Google or any other major search engine shows you a hacking board in the results nowadays, you can be almost completely sure the place is safe by Google standarts. And that is especially essential in terms of Android, since Android nowadays is pretty much Google. And Google will not show you the ways to hack Google.
So real tech-savvy places are underground if simply because modern search engine algorithms tend to hide the wrongthink from your eyes.
Thing is, just recently I had some nice talk with an Android-hacking crows, and they desccribed a number of interesting things to me. Like, how you can, in theory, build an Android OS without Google services in it locally, and it will be mostly working, but it will also miss several essential components, and that there's GrapheneOS project, which aims precisely to make a Google-less Android system, and so on... I even bought a book from them about Android hacking. Very nice book, complete with snippets of code and very detailed examples, albeit they honestly warned me that most of those tricks are way outdated and won't work on the Android above version 13. It is still an interesting book to read and play with on an Android emulator.
Anyway...
I do, however, agree with you, that in general the average population today is less technically educated than the population of 2000's. I never thought it will be the case; I thought the next generation would be akin to techno-demigods in their knowledge of PCs. Instead most of them do not even know how to launch a proper command line in Windows 10 and then wonder why their commands do not work, while I am a technowizard to them, even though I do not even know that much. It is sad, but it is true: somehow, the majority of users is way less tech-savvy than the majority of the zeroes.

tyl I know it can be hard to get this because I've struggled with understanding this for years too and I still absolutely hate how things have gotten to this point, I don't really understand why either honestly and I don't think I ever will but lying to myself that the shift has not happened would be counterproductive.

See, just to sum it up all of the above in few sentences: the shift did happen indeed, but I think you are panicking. If anything, I think nowadays, the government is even more willing to close the eyes on the few that avoid the digital law, because the majority obeys it. That's why we have bots that can download music from Spotify at hand's reach: Spotify just doesn't care if several thousands people will leech the music into files on their PCs, because millions still pay money.
But the few still exist, and while they are here, the solutions will be available for those who are willing to reach out.
...
It also might be the... cultural difference. See, here, in Russia, no one really gives a fuck if you torrent. Or if you hide your IP. Or if you use Tor. Or whatever. As long as you do it with minimal discretion, no one will lift a finger to somehow dissuade you from doing it. We don't even get angry "stop torrenting!" letters from ISPs like people in US do. So things are a bit different in my corner of web.
Finally...

tyl Yeah with the exception that even if you do bypass it and even if it was easy you're a criminal now, and not with a fine for breaching contract terms of copyright with some random company which also most internet users have done the same actually making it unfeasible to go after 99% of them, but you'll be facing long sentences for tricking government verification services, bypassing "child protection systems" and such.

I'm a criminal when I shoplift.
I'm a criminal when I paint graffiti on the wall.
I'm a criminal when I'm speeding and not wearing my seatbelt.
I'm probably a criminal for using proxies and accessing certain english websites as well, already. I don't really give a fuck.
Nothing really changes for me, so, uh... welcome to my world? Just do not expect me or anyone else to make it better for you somehow, or to find solutions for you. I'm fixing and fortifying my place up in any way I can, but I cannot provide you a guideline or something.

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