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Comment by Nursie | Hacker News Reader

Having discord on a machine is a sign of being a gamer, or any number of other things. VMs have a multitude of legit uses.

These things are not wrong to use, at best what this will do is scare idiot parents, and perhaps put some talented, interested kids off from learning more about computers as a bunch of clueless authority figure in their life freak out about completely innocent computer use.

At worst kids will be traumatised, put on watchlists and strain could be put on family cohesion.

For nothing.

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While I agree that having Discord should be innocuous, a parent who has no idea what Discord is should know that it could be used to talk to (potentially dangerous) strangers online.

A simple "Hey (son/daughter), the police told me that if anybody on Discord tells you to download LOIC, then you're probably in with the wrong crowd" is what I would hope would come of this (along with the typical internet stranger danger shpiel).

I also am scared of the worst case scenario you present, but this brochure doesn't seem like that to me.

A parent who has no idea what discord is but sees this poster is going to get the wrong idea, be suspicious of their kid and their kid's computer use, get scared and react badly.

"Hey kid stop doing that, turn off the computer we're taking it away, I saw that on a police poster" is more likely.

You don't tell people to contact the police over innocuous stuff like this. It's ridiculous.

The police in the UK are institutionally ignorant of computers and computer use, and this poster is harmful.

(edit: Can you not see this for what it is? Fear and ignorance in poster form?)

(edit2: The NCA have said they were not involved in this poster. Looks like an ignorant local police/council screwup)

My knee-jerk reaction was to see it as that, and usually that's the side I take, but the poster really isn't suggesting that learning these things are necessarily bad.

That's probably how most people will take it though, unfortunately.

Yeah, it really is, it's a scare poster. It's inviting you to phone the police (who have shown themselves ignorant by producing this in the first place) if your kid uses discord or virtual machines.

You're being deliberately contrarian here, to attempt to paint it as something positive.

Like I said, the NCA have distanced themselves from this nonsense, this is local cops who have no clue producing a bullshit poster.

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