If we taught systems thinking in schools things like internet age verification would never get past being an idea on the back of a napkin. People struggle to consider the second-, third-, and nth-order effects of anything so asking them to consider what else might happen if we bring in laws and technical mechanisms to 'protect the children' is unfortunately too a big leap for a lot of them. Most people are bad at spotting causal links between parts of a system, and people who are good at it exploit that.
cdrini 28 minutes ago [-]
I think there are many arguments for and against this type of regulation. Good arguments on both sides take into account nth-order effects. But both sides have different priorities, and have different weighing of the trade-offs. Calling one side effectively "thick" isn't really taking part in the debate.
(And cause and effect are taught pretty early on in school; not sure you need to learn "systems thinking" to understand nth-order effects.)
What are the nth-order effects that you think are not being considered or weighted accordingly by proponents of this regulation?
roenxi 7 hours ago [-]
In fairness, the evidence is that people already pretty firmly against things like chat control and the will to push it through tends to come from the political circles more than popular belief it is a good idea. I expect that if the measure itself went to a general vote, the majority would be against it once they have to deal with a specific proposal. It takes repeated pushes by the authoritarians looking for an opportunity to get things like speech controls or privacy violations through and the politicians mysteriously give up trying to roll it back no matter what the public pressure might be.
That being said, any expectation of thoughtfulness at all makes politics frustrating. Even basic things like why people keep making small random changes when most of these problems and solutions haven't changed in more than 2 millennia. And there is a pretty easy consensus to come to about what works. The repeated failures of authoritarianism to get to a good place are so consistent it is wild that people keep trying it.
friendzis 5 hours ago [-]
When you think about it, the idea of a representative democracy is rooted in the technical difficulties of implementing a direct democracy: both spread of information/discussion to the masses and organizing the votes.
In this day and age, probably with a relatively tiny investment into public access points, we could very reasonably have a technically functional direct democracy. The legislative cycle is already authenticated so there's no need to solve "authenticated anonymous vote" problem, European countries already have functional eIDAS systems to back the authentication part and the legislative systems are already to some degree digitized.
On one hand, the problem "what if someone sells their vote" is already present and unsolved, in the shape of lobbying. What's interesting, though, that we have built entire systems to shape public opinion and entrenched them into our daily lives, which are used by corporations and politicians alike.
This begs a question: is there such a thing as unbiased public opinion without authenticated internet access?
inb4: direct democracy does not mean parliamentary systems could be abolished altogether, central spaces for debate would still help solve discussion exchange problems
DrScientist 1 hours ago [-]
You are confusing the ability to bring information to people, with the ability of people to consume it.
As has been mentioned elsewhere on the thread - the real issue is often there are complex 2nd and third order effects, often there are devils in the details.
I'm not saying people are not capable of consuming it, I'm saying people don't have the bandwidth.
Direct democracy is best when it's used for very specific proposals with lots of time for debate - not every decision.
If you use it for every decision, time poor citizens will end up at the mercy of professional story tellers.
pc86 18 minutes ago [-]
Do you think the average person - ~98 IQ, at most one year of college but likely none, working some sort of retail, home health, or counter food service job - is truly capable of synthesizing third-order effects of a legal proposal and how it interacts with the current environment? If you do, what about someone 10% below average? 20%? Even at 20% below average intelligence we're still talking about one out of every three people, roughly.
I don't think it's just a bandwidth problem.
DrScientist 49 seconds ago [-]
A consequence of democracy means average people get a vote.
However average people are actually pretty good at making the right moral, common sense calls, if not the technical legal detail. I suspect that's in part because they are not living in the Westminister ( or whatever your seat of power is ) bubble.
So any system needs to blend that common sense, with specific expertise. In theory that's what a representative democracy does - however one of the failings currently is the party system ( note designed, in part, to overcome the bandwidth problem - people grouping together to give a single consistent message rather than 100's of independent ones ), where capture of the party by a few people has become too easy and some options that the majority of people want never being offered at the voting time.
This results in an increasingly angry and volatile electorate.
graemep 1 hours ago [-]
An alternative would be to select representatives by lot. It would get rid of a political class, would automatically be representative (so no arguments about whether women, minorities, whoever are fairly represented) and not select for people who want power and it would mean people have the same amount of time as those in the current system.
DrScientist 44 minutes ago [-]
I heard this idea, or variants of it, quite a lot recently.
Some of the examples I've seen it tried - I've seen the people setting it up trying to fix the outcome by carefully choosing the question, then providing expert advice on options scoped by the question.
Framing of the question is a powerful tool to promote the outcome you want, and avoiding ever asking certain questions is another.
Not saying it doesn't have it's place - you just need to be careful that the process isn't used to try and legitimise what would otherwise be unpopular policies via concentrated persuasion on a small number of people.
remus 36 minutes ago [-]
> When you think about it, the idea of a representative democracy is rooted in the technical difficulties of implementing a direct democracy: both spread of information/discussion to the masses and organizing the votes.
I think there is more to it. A large part of democracy is delegating decision making to people with time and expertise to investigate issues more thoroughly than most individuals can or want to.
I have some broad opinions about the environment etc. but I am by no means an expert in the details, so I am happy to delegate day to day decision making to someone with more expertise who's opinions broadly align with my own.
I'd agree that referendums do make more sense on "issues of conscience" though, like whether to have a death penalty, voting reform etc.
pc86 26 minutes ago [-]
Representative democracy is rooted in the idea that the average person is kind of a moron. Just look at states where it's incredibly easy to get state-wide referendums on basically anything on the ballot and you'll see the legal landscape there quickly becomes a mess.
Ouman 2 hours ago [-]
I am not sure the hard part of direct democracy was ever only the logistics of voting
echelon 17 minutes ago [-]
> When you think about it, the idea of a representative democracy is rooted in the technical difficulties of implementing a direct democracy: both spread of information/discussion to the masses and organizing the votes.
REPLACE FED CHAIR WITH DOVE OR HAWK?
BUILD NEW STRATEGIC BOMBERS?
START A WAR WITH IRAN?
VOTE NOW!
Imagine the chaos. Imagine all the ads.
Aeolun 3 hours ago [-]
If you make it legal to sell your vote, it’d become very obvious very quickly how much money is in politics.
lelandbatey 5 hours ago [-]
Is there such a thing as "unbiased public opinion" at all though? The memetic effects of language and communication means propaganda and similar tools of rhetoric and leveraged communication will always work, with or without an internet. There's no "solution", only "good enoughs".
Direct democracy is cool, but also impractical. I do not want to vote on every counties appropriations for road maintenance. So what's a level of direct democracy that's "good enough"? How do we make sure we're directly voting in things relevant to our lives? What if "relevant to our lives" is unrelated to our geographic location and is very interests based? If anyone can vote for anything, but most folks don't ever vote for most things, how do you prevent brigading of votes via coordination by groups who see that their group alone can swing what would be a small local vote whatever way they want by virtue of sheer numbers? How do you prevent trolls from going through every vote and just voting no on every "community center paper-and-ink budget" across the entire country?
There are so many questions I have about direct democracy systems! Do you have more information?
dbspin 25 minutes ago [-]
> Direct democracy is cool, but also impractical. I do not want to vote on every counties appropriations for road maintenance. So what's a level of direct democracy that's "good enough"?
This particular question has an extremely simple answer - derived from the decades of practical development of consensus based systems in democratic spaces (art spaces, leftist political groups etc). You vote / participate in the consensus decision making of the issues that are most important to you. It's that simple. Every issue is democratically decided, and you just 'tune in' to the ones that matter to you.
In terms of brigading / trolling are harder. In consensus institutions they're usually dealt with by limiting the amount of blocking (forcing tabling of an issue) and ensuring that voting / consensus participation is limited to those who are actively involved in the community. This is obviously far more complex on a societal level.
Overall this requires a bigger investment of time, but you're in no way required to care about everything. Over time though, the group / institution / society, is forced to grow up. Or at least grow out of the learned helplessness that dominates contemporary representative democracy.
AnthonyMouse 2 hours ago [-]
> I do not want to vote on every counties appropriations for road maintenance.
The best way to do this is through a combination of subsidiarity and constitutional rights.
You have a central government but its primary purpose is to set out and uphold fundamental rights. It essentially sets out what the local governments can't do, so you can't have ex post facto laws, censor speech, detain people without trial, try to enforce local laws on actions performed in remote jurisdictions, etc.
In particular, the central government should not be in the business of regulating private conduct. Only the local governments do that.
Then you don't have to be worried about appropriations for road maintenance in some other county because you don't live there. Whereas the appropriations in your county are coming out of your pocket, and aren't such a far away thing that your vote is being diluted into irrelevance, so then maybe you want to be paying some attention to that.
coldtea 3 hours ago [-]
>Is there such a thing as "unbiased public opinion" at all though?
Doesn't really matter except philosophically. There's something close enough to unbiased public opinion when there are no government propaganda campaings, censorship, press owned by conglomerates, and corporate messaging.
TheOtherHobbes 2 hours ago [-]
In most political systems the two functions of government are rationing and ideological control for the poor and profiteering for the rich. The media provide marketing and propaganda support for both.
It's very hard to have truly independent media.
dguest 4 hours ago [-]
I think everyone can agree that having O(100M) people vote on every local initiative is absurd.
But a lot of countries are somewhere on the "direct" vs "representative" spectrum. The US actually abnormally lacking in direct mechanisms, for example. See
> The US actually abnormally lacking in direct mechanisms
only on a federal level. states like california or texas are more direct than a lot of western europe in some ways. like the fact that ballot props are binding law or sheriffs and state attorneys are elected.
coldtea 3 hours ago [-]
>I think everyone can agree that having O(100M) people vote on every local initiative is absurd.
I'm one of those everyones, and I don't agree.
Except if you mean local initiatives that don't concern 100M people, but e.g. some regional municipality. Of course then just the locals can vote, be they 100K or 1M.
dguest 2 hours ago [-]
Yes! I meant local issues that don't concern 100M people. Local issues that concern a few thousand people can be (and often are) resolved by direct democracy.
I guess I could argue that putting a stop sign at a particular intersection in rural Kansas could concern me, even though I don't live in Kansas, but I think very few people would make that argument in good faith.
xinayder 4 hours ago [-]
The Swiss succeeded in this, maybe we should look at their model and improve.
AnthonyMouse 2 hours ago [-]
Switzerland is a country with a total population approximately the size of the state of New Jersey. This being too centralized for most things, they then further divided that population into 26 cantons ranging in size from approximately the size of New Hampshire at the high end to "that number of people would be classified as a town rather than a city" at the low end.
The median size looks to be around 200,000 people, so maybe start by dividing the US population into cantons of around that size and doing most of the rulemaking at that level.
po1nt 4 hours ago [-]
The best level of democracy is no democracy. The problem of voting for road repairs is a problem we created by democracy. We voted ourselves into a system we can't escape, just because people back in the days couldn't fully comprehend side effects of their collective decisions.
Very few people realize that there is option to not use government cohersion as a solution to everything.
I know this is unpopular opinion. The system is designed for this to be unpopular opinion.
But the problem is not the democracy, but the level of power we give to the government. If the only power of government would be to pick flag colors and national anthem, no one would care about it.
No one cares about UK having a king, because it doesn't change a thing.
teiferer 3 hours ago [-]
> The best level of democracy is no democracy.
That's a quite fatal view. I'm not going to defend the shortcomings of democracy as a system or the issues all real implementations have. But democracy has a feature that is unique about it: as long as it actually is a democracy, as soon as things go a way that the people don't like, they can do something about it and change course. For better or worse, but they can. That's the main point of democracy.
Besides, having votes or electionsor is really just a minor detail of the concept of democracy. There is much more to it, like a free conversation in society, strong independent education, journalism, justice, protection of minorities, etc. The will of the people doesn't fall from the sky or is set in stone. It's a permanent conversation which needs all the other mechanisms. If all that happens is a vote every few years, that's not at all indicative of a democracy. Neither is democracy synonymous with majority rule.
> Very few people realize that there is option to not use government cohersion as a solution to everything.
What is "cohersion"? There are "cohesion" and "coercion". Assuming the latter, what does this have to do with democracy? An autocracy or dictarship or whatever non-democratic system you can imagine also likely has a government, and their coercion mechanisms tend to be worse than in democracies. In a democracy you have an independent judical system that you can use against government overreach.
oarsinsync 3 hours ago [-]
> No one cares about UK having a king, because it doesn't change a thing.
Which is the position the Monarchy absolutely wants you to have, and they definitely don't want you to know that they have veto power over all laws, and regularly intervene and get laws modified so that they're not included in scope.
Meanwhile they just gave themselves a massive pay rise, at a time when government is cutting public spending in all areas.
nephihaha 3 hours ago [-]
The BBC is monarchist to the core. A lot of people say the BBC is biased in one political direction or another, but they often forget about monarchism.
One notable example of their privilege was when Andrew George MP dared to ask a question in parliament about the Duchy of Cornwall, only to be told he wasn't allowed to. (The Duchy of Cornwall is a kind of slush fund for the heir to throne. Charles had it before he became king. It has tax breaks, and also the ability to seize property and mine on people's land.)
nephihaha 3 hours ago [-]
Actually quite a few people care about the UK having a king, in the UK. In Northern Ireland, there is a considerable republican (small "r" population) for political reasons.
The BBC promotes the monarchy heavily as it is under royal charter.
There were significant protests at the Queen's funeral cortege and the current king's coronation. The state clamped down hard, in one case arresting someone for holding up a blank bit of paper.
pc86 30 minutes ago [-]
The problem is that "the authoritarians" (read: almost every politician at every level of government, but a drastically increasing percentage the higher you go) only need to get something passed once then it is there forever.
Every law should have an automatic sunset period of 1-10 years that requires it to pass the entire legislative process again, or at least both full chambers + signing.
beezlewax 6 hours ago [-]
I emailed my local TD minister in Ireland about the inherent dangers of chat control. They had some lacky respond with an email that framed the conversation in a way that made it look like I was interested in the illegal content and not privacy/control or nefarious future governments.
monssooon 5 hours ago [-]
This is what I fear the most. It is gas lighting and just manipulation. The idea of privacy will become associated with crime.
Further down the line technical solutions that are private will become illegal and in general not being pro survailance will get you in trouble
ShinyLeftPad 4 hours ago [-]
Do you acknowledge that for many people and practically e2ee and crime are connected? e2ee is a very useful tool for crime and combined with crypto useful tool for monetizing crime. Criminals used to speak in code, meet clandestine, use burner phones and websites were easy to shut down. Now they don't need to.
The solution to privacy problem is not to shout while closing your ears but to make it clear that you see their side, how new tech create new problems, and help solve it in least privacy invasive ways.
Otherwise you will always be seen as somebody who has shady agenda. It's just reality. Ordinary people do not care about e2ee. Gotta read the room.
But chat control and age verification are different things.
teiferer 3 hours ago [-]
> Ordinary people do not care about e2ee. Gotta read the room.
It's a matter of phrasing things. Moxie had this illustrative take: If your chat is not e2ee, it'a a group chat. It's you, your mom, every secret service in the world and some ISP employees as well. If we could clarify to our social circles and broader society that every non-e2ee chat can be browsed by some overpaid freckled 20-something borded out of his mind at a FAANG or an ISP then the viewpoint could change.
ShinyLeftPad 2 hours ago [-]
Tons of people use IG and I think they pretty much know that it's them, the other guy and whatever number of contractors monitoring chats. They just don't care.
Maybe one of the most helpful parallels is with mail. I think US and other countries have strict laws about mail communication privacy. Someone can in theory open your mail but it's strictly regulated and not done in a total way.
Also I do think talking about future malicious government prosecuting people based on what was collected previously is actually a good one. But just talking about privacy may be a little too vague.
drtgh 1 hours ago [-]
> But chat control and age verification are different things.
Although they appear to be different different things at first sight, they share the same agenda and objective, mass surveillance and identification of the citizens. Once the door is opened, it can be expected that things will not end there; Politicians and their patrons will exploit this data under "committees" (and of course be excluded from such surveillance as an aggravating factor).
Nowadays it's needed a court order to access legally to the privacy of citizens, and this must be done by the Police or the Interpol, nevertheless someones want to break this.
If they were really worried by the citizens security, they would increase the number of police and judges working in this digital divisions, among other things related to this.
teiferer 3 hours ago [-]
> The idea of privacy will become associated with crime.
The risk is there but it is not a given. The debate is not new, it's been going on for decades. It's a permanent struggle.
theodric 4 hours ago [-]
Respond and ask them directly if they're accusing you of a crime, or if they intend to address the point of your message rather than making libelous statements that they may later be forced to explain should they persist.
chii 7 hours ago [-]
Stupid things like brexit was put to a vote, but really important things such as age verification and mass surveillance are never put to any vote.
teiferer 3 hours ago [-]
In what way was Brexit a stupid thing? It was an extemely important decision, directly affecting everybody's life. If asking people about anything then isn't that what it should be? You might not like the outcome (I don't) but I consider the question of Brexit important.
ben_w 2 hours ago [-]
Analogy:
Cancer surgery is an extremely important decision, directly affecting many people's lives.
What happened with Brexit was a analogous a bunch of salesmen on TV saying "that mysterious ache you have, don't listen to doctors who say it's fine, call our surgical team today! It's cancer! We can fix this quickly and you'll be back to your old self within a week!" for two decades, then the country agreeing, going to surgery, and waking up to find they'd had half their liver removed, the post-surgical biopsy results said it was fine and not cancerous at all, it took 6 months to recover and they could never drink alcohol again. And the ache was still there.
If it had been an honest "we know it will cost X, we are willing to spend this because otherwise what is the point of money", that would have been totally fair.
Instead, problems that weren't caused by the EU were blamed on it for decades, while the benefits of membership were treated as the natural state of the world to the extent that talk of losing them was equated with "being punished".
epihelix 2 hours ago [-]
Should we also have a referendum on reducing the tax rate to zero? It would also be an extremely important decision, directly affecting everybody's life. If asking people about anything, then isn't that what it should be?
Not all referenda that might win a "yes" vote are sensible to propose.
> The referendum was originally conceived by David Cameron as a means to defeat the anti-EU faction within his own party by having it fail.
After that, another issue is that the leave campaign was heavily based on lies and misleading the British voters.
Couple that with a extreme form of policy lock-in / hysteresis: you need just to form a small margin in a majority at a single point of time. After that point of time, the popular opinion doesn't matter anymore because getting back to EU isn't as easy as leaving. So the misinformation campaign need to work just once. By the time voters realize what happened, it's too late.
This situation is a critical failure of democracy. Not just direct democracy, representative democracy can't work in a post-truth world either.
But Brexit was a vote, by the people. Yes, the pro-leave campaign lied to no ends, but people still made a choice on their own and the majority for leave was quite slim.
This is very different to age sniffing here. Age sniffing is not being queried via public votum - lobbyists push it through without any resistance. It's amazing how this works.
This whole argument is why we do not have more direct democracy. The people in power and people who benefit from the status quo do not want the hoi polloi taking the "wrong" decisions. We might end up nationalising things or taxing big business effectively or all sorts of terrible things. Better to just give people the illusion of choice by letting them choose between two "neo-liberal" parties.
egorfine 4 hours ago [-]
> the evidence is that people already pretty firmly against things like chat control
I'm not sure about that at all. All my normies friends have no problem immediately submitting their documents to any KYC service that requests it. And talking about chat control they happily parrot the propaganda points, which is something very normal given that they have no insight as we do.
So unfortunately I believe that the laymen are all in favor of chat control.
Ouman 2 hours ago [-]
I agree that it is not always mass public demand for authoritarianism. Often it is more like institutional persistence plus vague moral framing
themaninthedark 15 minutes ago [-]
I disagree, if anything the last 12 years or so have shown that there are groups on both sides of the political spectrum that are quite willing to engage and justify censorship.
From "Muh freeze peach" to the actual government requested censorship during COVID everyone is rushing to get a new shiny stick they can use to beat their political opponents with.
lopis 2 hours ago [-]
> the evidence is
I don't believe this. I believe us more tech oriented people live in a dangerous bubble that reassures us that obviously people are against it. But that's very likely not true.
maccard 4 hours ago [-]
I’m not in favour of Chat Control;
> the evidence is that people already pretty firmly against things like chat control and the will to push it through tends to come from the political circles more than popular belief it is a good idea.
This is quite the statement. What evidence do you have that of this? Here in the UK, the equivalent bills are pretty widely supported across he board.
> I expect that if the measure itself went to a general vote, the majority would be against it once they have to deal with a specific proposal
This is likely true of pretty much anything, though. Imagine suggesting that people collectively fund a national road network by paying 20% of their income to the government (or whatever number your state/country/municipality chooses). All of a sudden it’s a terrible idea!
gigatexal 5 hours ago [-]
But it’s not about critical thinking or governing well it’s about getting re-elected.
So the argument will go to “think of the children” which is a guise for more control and then pretty soon we are living in the dystopian future of 1984 or the UK where the film V for Vendetta took place.
This same kind of thinking gets idiots like Trump elected because people don’t have any sense of the commons and become single issue voters (sic). “Oh just reduce my taxes on my carried interest… reduce my taxes… I’m a xenophobe I hate immigrants let’s not do anything systematic let’s just hard close the border or the world is flat America only exists we don’t need allies or trading partners (JD Vance) … and so on”
raxxorraxor 1 hours ago [-]
No, not everyone exploits that. But those that reject these controls are often ridiculed because the thought about any side effect is too alien.
Yet I don't think age verification will work with national IDs for that matter. I generally use social media sites that won't implement it.
But yes, the normal insta/tiktok user will be affected and not think too much about it. Others will have true freedom of speech.
petcat 57 minutes ago [-]
> I generally use social media sites that won't implement it.
Which social media sites won't implement it?
raxxorraxor 37 minutes ago [-]
Most of them are more insignificant than Twitter, Insta, TikTok. And while they do employ advertising here and there, profit is only interesting for keeping up with server costs.
NoPicklez 7 hours ago [-]
Well we teach people the health benefits of physical activity school but many don't continue with it.
onion2k 7 hours ago [-]
Sorry, this is going to be a rant. :)
Admittedly it's a long time since I was in school, but when I was there the notion of teaching the benefits of physical activity was limited to being told to run about for some 'sport', and absolutely nothing about why that's a good idea. Everyone was expected to do the same thing with no consideration for ability, disability, or motivation. Kids were punished with detentions for refusing to endure painful exercise that they couldn't do as well as their more capable peers.
The very obvious second order effect of poor physical education is fat unmotivated adults who don't exercise. Maybe educators need some systems thinking training too.
5693802 5 hours ago [-]
I'd add that not only were we not taught about health benefits in PE classes, the punishment for non-participation was not only detention but also potentially failing the entire grade. I ended up dropping out in my first year of high school due to a culmination of similar issues. I loved and still love learning, but my school was not an environment for learning. It was an environment for teaching rigid obedience to authority, and nothing more.
My particular favorite thing to rant about is how, on the first day, I was held in detention for the entire day and made to skip the introduction to my classes because I unknowingly wore the wrong shade of blue for the dress code. Like the middle school in the same district, the dress code required a white, red, or blue polo (FUCK YEAH AMERICA!!!!), but the shade of blue from the middle school uniforms was not allowed, something I was never aware of but instead got arbitrarily punished for along with dozens of others, with my parent being made to buy a new set of uniform shirts after school.
It is no wonder that the US is in a state of decline given how horrid the schooling is. I can't imagine a worse environment for stifling intellectual curiosity than the one I was in.
Aeolun 3 hours ago [-]
That must be a joke right?
lopis 2 hours ago [-]
I was in school for 12 years and for 11 of those years I was told I was bad at sports. It was only in the last year of high-school that I finally had a PE teacher that actually tried to teach us that sports is about doing what we like and moving our bodies. I had top grades that year and finally learned that I liked (some) sports. Turns out I was just bad at football (soccer) which was what we were forced to do 90% of the time.
philipbjorge 7 hours ago [-]
It’s been 25 years since I was in school and this was my experience. Unsure if it’s changed…
CalRobert 6 hours ago [-]
Ironically when I was in high school I was fat and hated pe but biked about 20 minutes to school every day. Now in middle age I still bike everywhere and am in better shape than most of my peers..
Turns out I just really really hate running.
HerbManic 5 hours ago [-]
Same. In my mid 40's and probably in the top 20% of my age group.
Absolutely hate running!
ben_w 2 hours ago [-]
Having grown up through the early-ish days of the web, I'm still surprised the internet in general didn't get an 18+ age rating almost immediately.
Though I suppose that may have something to do with households in the early days having at most one internet connected device even if they were well off, so society could get away with blaming parents for not monitoring kids' use.
vessenes 1 hours ago [-]
Don’t underestimate the impact of AOL - the main experience boomers and greatest generation had of the early internet was moderated and mediated. My parents were not on IRC.
TomasBM 1 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately, I don't think systems thinking alone would help much.
One could present the case in favor of Internet age verification to the nth-order effects, while downplaying the effects in the case against.
So, in addition to presenting the cases with foreseeable effects, we need ways to compare the impact of worst-case scenarios in the two cases, and make a decision or compromise based on that.
Ouman 2 hours ago [-]
A lot of bad tech policy seems to come from judging a proposal only by its stated intent
bluegatty 7 hours ago [-]
No, we have any number of social constructs around 'age and responsibility' - driving, alcohol, pubs, porn, excessive violence and so much more.
It's bereft to suggest that we wouldn't nominally have those in the digital world.
And, people are concerned about nth order effects, it's a huge point of debate.
Yes - there is a huge slippery slope argument to be made, but it's an argument ... to be made. There are all sorts of ways of doing this.
dv_dt 7 hours ago [-]
Social media age verification is like none of those - social media is the modern public square and age verification is asking everybody to show their papers before participating in free speech in the public. It will have a chilling effect on free speech and will be a tool for authoritarian control
gherkinnn 4 hours ago [-]
Social media, as we have it today, has nothing to do with a public square.
A public square does not have trolls and bots from across the globe teleporting in and out. A public square does not amplify the most divisive comments and drown out your friends's holiday photos because the former makes the ad space more profitable.
simondotau 6 hours ago [-]
A poor analogy.
The public square has never been properly anonymous. If you start saying things which contravene laws or the rights of others, the police have been able to capture you and unmask your identity, if concealed.
dv_dt 6 hours ago [-]
So the solution for criminals in the public is for everybody to show their papers walking into a public square? It is not, we have requirements for police process like warrants and a process for determining the requirements for urgent conditions of arrest.
bluegatty 6 hours ago [-]
No, obviously not, and this is a completely glib argument.
Who is suggesting people 'show their papers' to go into a public square?
Literally nobody.
It really demonstrates how bad the analogy is - so much so that it's not even analogy.
The 'social controls' on the 'public square' are limited by a few laws (aka directed violence) but apart from that you can say as you like, kids can as well - it's where parents can be parents.
And - don't have problem with kids in the public square.
We have a very real problem with kids on social media, verifiable, scientific.
Kids are depressed, distracted, they bully each other, they're creeped on, and they're not yet in the business having serious discussions about 'Mein Kampf' - they're kids.
Everything in kids lives is introduced in an 'age appropriate' fashion - literally everything.
Given the toxicity of social media, it's a 'primary concern' for one of those gated things.
This is not even an argument - the only argument is 'the slippery slope'.
dv_dt 6 hours ago [-]
The science for age bans on social media is weak at best. There were pretty much terrible studies done during Covid and did not attribute all sorts of uncertainty going on at the same time.
If the point were to improve on the mental health of kids there are countless underfunded public programs. Especially in the US, social support programs like food, healthcare basic and mental, actual physical public spaces for kids, arts in curriculum, etc.
simondotau 5 hours ago [-]
For what it’s worth, as an Australian, and as the operator of an online community, I unreservedly approve of the social media ban enforced by our government.
Conversely, I don’t agree with the way some other countries are going about it. Especially the UK with the abysmal way they have physically policed online speech by adults. Incredibly sad to see police prioritise non-violent “speech crimes” because they’re too scaredy-cat to tackle actual violent crime.
There is a reasonable answer to be found, if we're willing to be inventive. It shouldn’t be beyond the imagination of cryptography experts to design a system where only governments can issue an age identification certificate, which individuals can use to generate verifiable proof of age tokens. But where the tokens can’t be used by the government to identify the individual.
fyredge 5 hours ago [-]
This is hauntingly reminiscent of the gun law argument in US:
The government shouldn't infringe on my right to bear arms, mass shooting is a mental health issue anyways, oh but we can't really fund mental health support because my tax shouldn't go towards helping those who put themselves in that situation. Que the same argument for privacy on the internet.
You can't have your cake and eat it too. If you can't trust the government, then work towards healing it, restructuring it, overhauling it. Subverting the government is such antisocial behaviour, very criminal like.
simondotau 6 hours ago [-]
If that’s how you interpreted my post, I can only hypothesis that you didn’t read it. I can’t think of another explanation.
I actually like the traditional public square model: you have anonymity most of the time, but it’s not some absolute shield you can abuse to be an obnoxious prick. The police can intervene, but the intervention happens in the public square too.
hparadiz 6 hours ago [-]
People publish entire books anonymously.
simondotau 5 hours ago [-]
Yes, and plenty of people have spoken in the public square anonymously too, because the police didn't feel the need to arrest them.
Publishing a book anonymously in the public square still means someone has to physically manufacture it, distribute it, convince you to read it, and pay for all of this. All these steps are subject to interdiction by the police.
pavlov 6 hours ago [-]
Was there ever a public square where children could participate anonymously among adults? (I’m imagining three Dickensian urchins in a trench coat giving a speech in Hyde Park.)
bluegatty 6 hours ago [-]
Your local library has age and ID requirements.
Your local 'town square' has 'some rules'.
Parents are entirely able to overcome any of this if they so choose - including feeding their kids alcohol, guns etc. - and so the freedom does materially exist.
Social Media isn't a place for free expression - it's mostly toxic - like exposing your children to the most vile, inauthentic people.
The more genteel places, frankly, won't have much in the way of age restrictions.
Entire nations are banning social media for kids because it's just not healthy - the teachers want it, the parents want it, the data seems to support it.
I think you're right to be (very concerned) but this is a necessary discussion. As a teacher.
Telaneo 5 hours ago [-]
> Your local library has age and ID requirements.
It literally doesn't (at least not if I don't intend to borrow a book and take it home; if I stay there and read, I can do so without any ID. I only need ID to get a library card, and I don't need that to enter and read a book).
bluegatty 5 hours ago [-]
It literally does - and you just admitted it.
The point is that 'even the local library' enacts rules and social conventions - not that they're exhaustively and acutely enforced in all corners.
No 4chan section in the library?
You might wonder why it doesn't have vast array of avant guard adult content, porn or art with really aggressive themes and people calling each other the n-word?
In society we have 'age related' conventions all over the place ... including your Library.
This is the absolute worst of HN, where people dissolve into Reddit-like discussions of bad meatphors and totally out of context hair splitting.
I just can't believe anyone here has any relationship with the reality of children, teaching or parenting whatsoever. It's the same argument made by the 'drugs should be legal and accessible' crowd - completely oblivious to the instantaneous massive health epidemic we'd have with opioids and fentanyl, or the 'anti vaxer' crowd - narrow ideological arguments about expression disconnected from any kind of reality or nuance.
There's a variation of social media that will be fine for the kids, they can be exposed to more into their late teens. Parents that want to opt out, will de facto be allowed to - and there is always a slippery slope with every law.
Telaneo 4 hours ago [-]
> It literally does - and you just admitted it.
I can be 9 years old and go to the library and read any book they have without showing ID. Whatever your point is, it escapes me.
> The point is that 'even the local library' enacts rules and social conventions - not that they're exhaustively and acutely enforced in all corners.
Then let us do the same thing on the internet. Age verification is not that (at least in the forms being pushed).
> No 4chan section in the library?
No, but there are 4chan-style books I can read there. Anything that isn't outright illegal (Anarchist's cookbook) is pretty darn available there.
> You might wonder why it doesn't have vast array of avant guard adult content, porn or art with really aggressive themes and people calling each other the n-word?
That'd be because it does have books like that. Your point continues to escape me. Maybe my library is really pushing whatever limits.
> I just can't believe anyone here has any relationship with the reality of children, teaching or parenting whatsoever
I've literally been an assistant teacher for about a year. You probably won't believe me though.
> It's the same argument made by the 'drugs should be legal and accessible' crowd
Who I agree with! Funny how that works!
> completely oblivious to the instantaneous massive health epidemic we'd have with opioids and fentanyl
Imagine a world where we can have that regulated, so people know what they're taking, and can see a doctor to get help without getting the police on their back, rather than the unregulated shitshow we have now.
> or the 'anti vaxer' crowd - narrow ideological arguments about expression disconnected from any kind of reality or nuance.
This comparison escapes me too. Anti-vax started with (or at least got a massive growth boost by) Andrew Wakefield, whose paper was based on science so bad and whose research was so heinous he's no longer a doctor. If the 'drugs should be legal and accessible' stance is based on science that bad, I'd love to see it.
bluegatty 3 hours ago [-]
"Then let us do the same thing on the internet. Age verification is not that (at least in the forms being pushed)."
So you prefer the internet be censored to be as civil as the library?
'Age appropriate' content is the easiest and most obvious way to do this, particularly because of the effects of social media on young minds.
---
"No, but there are 4chan-style books I can read there." (at the library)
Nonsense.
This is 4Chan [1] , and your library does not contain stuff like this.
---
"that'd be because it does have books like that."
Again - no - your library contains books in 'avant gard' art that you think is 'avant gard', but it's in the civil sense.
Your library does not contain books or films showing 'rape voyeurism'.
---
"Imagine a world where we can have that regulated, so people know what they're taking,"
They do! It's right on the bottle! In exact quantities and 'high quality ingredients'!
It's made by PURDUE PHARMA, dispensed by doctors, and has caused a vicious national epidemic affecting millions of lives - and is the leading cause of death for ages 18-45 !!
It's truly the litmus test of 'common sense' vs. 'naive ideology'
The 'starting point' for 'harm reduction' is a reasonable reaction to ugly, ham fisted authoritarian 'throw them all in jail' traditional approaches - especially those milder things like 'marijuana' etc.
But in the end 'Harm Reduction' is actually a 'Radical Religious Progressive Cult of Ideology' rooted in the belief that 'Policing' and 'Patriarchy' the the 'Justice System' are the source of all harms, completely oblivious to basic human behaviour, mixed in with a bunch of Libertarian nonsense.
It's not unreasonable to posit that in 'some cases' an addict can have 'controlled access' to a substance 'without judgment' to help them stabilize, and find a path off of heroin on etc.
This is the 'polite' argument, but it's completely effete.
In reality that those cases are surprisingly rare, clinical, and extremely expensive to administer and control.
Reality is 'the alley full of zombies'.
Drugs kill substantially more people than guns - in Canada guns kill about 300 vs 7000 overdose deaths / year.
That's ballpark 40K-80K non-lethal overdoses per year. Every human who has had an 'overdose' is in a very distressed state - their lives may never recover. Each of them has family members who are in distress.
The 'world you are imagining' (where Fentanyl is available over the counter in 'whatever dose') is 5-10% of of the population hospitalized for opioid related problems within 6 months, and a collapse of the medical and law enforcement systems, not to mention all of the other knock on effects aka huge spike in small crime, loss of workforce, taxation, child welfare problems etc..
Singapore, which takes a very aggressive and authoritarian 'zero tolerance' approach has less than 1% of the deaths.
Less than 1%.
99% percent of those dying of overdose, ostensibly are dying because we refuse to actually take action.
And - because they have such a dramatically lower rate of addiction they can afford full rehab for the remaining actual addicts - this is the most damning evidence against the 'harm reduction' approach: it engenders so many addicts that even as 'rich nations' , we can't afford to help, whereas if we could 'contain the problem', we could afford to focus more on actual addicts.
The 'world you need to imagine' is one where we actually are able to restrict fentanyl, definitely restrict doctors from handing out entire bottles, and are able to afford actual rehab for those how need it.
Addiction is a social disease: it's a learned behaviour transmitted from one person to another. The most dangerous thing to society, is not a 'guy with a gun' - it's a fentanyl addict who will teach or induce someone around them into 'walking death'. That form of 'transmission' is actually more dangerous than COVID.
We're not going to expose our kids to free drugs, or guns, or porn, or vodka, and neither will our kids not use Social Media until they're old enough to be properly socialized to ingest and understand the impact of it.
Then they grow to be adults and make their own decisions, watch porn ... drink vodka ... just not fentanyl. That's it.
---
(Warning, this is a 4-chan like to crude content - only to make a point about what 4chan is)
> So you prefer the internet be censored to be as civil as the library?
Given that I can find books that aren't civil there, sure.
> This is 4Chan [1] , and your library does not contain stuff like this.
Finding dick pics at my local library isn't hard, if you know where to look. Ditto 4chan.
> Your library does not contain books or films showing 'rape voyeurism'.
That'd be because it's illegal. Hence my comment about that.
> It's made by PURDUE PHARMA, dispensed by doctors, and has caused a vicious national epidemic affecting millions of lives - and is the leading cause of death for ages 18-45 !!
I'm glad I don't live in the US, where doctors are lobbied (this doesn't seem like the right word, but you get the idea) to push opiates or whatever other drugs on patients, only to then get away with it. Preventing things like that is also included in 'a world where we can have that regulated'. For instance:
> The 'world you need to imagine' is one where we actually are able to restrict fentanyl, definitely restrict doctors from handing out entire bottles, and are able to afford actual rehab for those how need it.
I agree we should restrict doctors from pushing opioids! And rehab should be state sponsored! That too is harm reduction.
> Singapore, which takes a very aggressive and authoritarian 'zero tolerance' approach has less than 1% of the deaths.
Ah, yes, sterile Singapore. I guess 30 years in prison is better than dying.
I'll refrain from commenting on the rest of your post. Have a good day. I know I won't.
dv_dt 6 hours ago [-]
My local librarian did not restrict my books to the kids section when I was a kid. Also librarians have fought civil legal battles to keep reading activities anonymous. Libraries are unlike the restrictions and risks of the proposed legislation being discussed for social media
bluegatty 5 hours ago [-]
?
--> Your local library fought for your right to read literature of some kind.
---> They did not fight for your right to gang up on others and call them the n-word, to spread lies and slander about people, to harass children and expose them to creeps and pedophiles, to inundate children with hyper-targeted advertising, or 'Andrew Tate 'how to beat women' seminars'.
Nobody is pushing for a ban on social media so that the kids will be stopped from reading 'Judy Bloom' stories about a girl's 'first period'.
It's disingenuous to suggest that this has anything to do with the causes your librarians stand for.
Literally the opposite - your librarians are creating essentially 'safe spaces' for kids so they can read and be civil.
dv_dt 4 hours ago [-]
Im not sure of your direction as the age verification legislation also does not address this:
| They did not fight for your right to gang up on others and call them the n-word, to spread lies and slander about people, to harass children and expose them to creeps and pedophiles, to inundate children with hyper-targeted advertising, or 'Andrew Tate 'how to beat women' seminars'.
I think existing laws should be engaged to address pedophiles and incitement of violence in public spaces and social media - no new legislation is really needed. Barring potential victims from a place instead of prosecuting the noxious behavior from the public place seems like an odd approach indeed.
As for libraries - libraries are curated spaces of freedom that are obviously under assault by right wing parties to ban books that support cultural and personal acceptance for other societies as well as out groups like lgbt information, and even basic women's health information. The problem for authoritarians is libraries are too free - not that they are "curated".
TFNA 4 hours ago [-]
The public square was in communities small enough where townspeople knew each other, and so speech was not anonymous besides those who penned (but not those who distributed) unattributed pamphlets. Moreover, if the speech you were pronouncing was beyond the pale of the community’s values, you could face retribution for it, whether judicial or extra-judicial like tarring and feathering. Even in the nascent USA whose political elite was high on Lockean ideas of natural rights and freedom of speech, the public square was never a free-for-all.
raxxorraxor 40 minutes ago [-]
My supposedly modern government has problems with all kinds of speech and this is a lazy excuse. Government needs really hard boundaries and not being able to identify someone who perhaps said something controversial is a pretty good one.
You are right about the public square. That is pretty much what governments want to enforce. To silence everyone not in line, like in medieval towns.
Nursie 6 hours ago [-]
Social media as it has become now is a shitshow where a minority of angry and/or disingenuous posters dominate discourse.
Twitter (X) was never the public square, and now it's little more than a playground for propagandists. The rest of us do well to ignore it, and it seems that even the 'legacy' media are starting to realise the days of breathlessly reporting on tweet-storms weren't great for anyone.
hparadiz 6 hours ago [-]
In a recent survey of under sixteen year olds in a place where an under sixteen social media ban exists asked how many of them used social media found that 80% were still using it. Do you actually need a login to consume social media? The answer to that is no. You can doom scroll all you want on sites like Reddit with no account whatsoever.
hogehoge51 3 hours ago [-]
If we taught systems thinking in any educational setting, and it took hold for a significant portion of the population, we would have already transcended into immortal thinking energy beings and age verification debates would be irrelevant....
vortegne 18 minutes ago [-]
Classic STEM guy thinking that STEM is the cure for everything
frankie_t 3 hours ago [-]
Do you (or anyone else) have a good resource for learning systems thinking? I might have some from working in SE and just observing the world, but I've never studied it
stymaar 6 hours ago [-]
“Age verification” isn't a problem in itself, the problem is how it's done. They could issue a physical id card with a cryptographic chip and do the age verification in a zero-knowledge fashion and it would be perfectly fine.
The problem is the lack of thinking about the solution and just handwaving “age verification” as a political posture, which is why we end up with half-baked systems.
ball_of_lint 5 hours ago [-]
I strongly disagree.
You're framing this as some desirable thing that could be good except that a bad implementation erodes privacy. That's wrong at every step. These bills originate from big tech such as Meta that literally profit from collecting as much personal info from you as possible. https://old.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/1rsn1tm/it_a...
But even beyond their tainted origins, you can't implement your way out of something badly formed in the first place. You handwave "zero knowledge" but that doesn't do for your privacy what you're hoping it will. That id card will still have a serial number and CCTV of you purchasing it and you will de facto end up trusting some government binary blob to implement this cryptography correctly without backdoors. Snowden was a decade ago. This will have a backdoor. This will be used for surveillance, tomorrow even if by some miracle not today.
And finally, this makes the internet worse. There will be a section of people who are, for one reason or another, not able to pass this bar. Much of the goodness of the internet comes from being able to interact with anyone on it.
MaKey 5 hours ago [-]
This assumes good faith, which doesn't match reality. It's about control, not protecting children.
Also age verification is still a problem in itself. Given your idea of a physical card, kids will find a way to use the card of their parents. Even if the card couldn't be misused by others - you give platforms the knowledge of whom is a minor, which means they can be targeted better.
jonathanstrange 4 hours ago [-]
Kids will simply find a way to circumvent it without any extra steps. To make age verification useful for protecting kids, you'd need to lock down every software on every operating system and put it under tight government control. We're talking about things like every programming language with a networking library, wget, curl, every web browser that was ever developed, etc.
All kinds of tools and software would need to be locked down or criminalized. Otherwise, some smart kid is guaranteed to get around the restriction and give that method to others, and if it's at school on a USB stick.
stymaar 3 hours ago [-]
> Kids will simply find a way to circumvent it without any extra steps.
This is just an argument against any regulation whatsoever. Yes, some people will find ways to do illegal stuff, but that doesn't mean forbidding stuff is useless. For instance gangs members always find a way to get access to weapons even in countries where firearms is regulated, but there are still pretty much zero mass slaughter in schools in these countries.
> To make age verification useful for protecting kids, you'd need to lock down every software on every operating system and put it under tight government control.
No! This should never be implemented at the software or OS level in the first place. You should be handed a chip card that you can use for that purpose, like how the bank rent you a credit card. Any other implementation is a bad one, and should be fought.
But by fighting the very idea of age verification instead, an idea that pretty much nobody else in the society has issues with when it comes to voting rights, driving rights, or alcohol consumption, you are just favoring these poor implementations by moving the debate on a ground you can't win.
> Otherwise, some smart kid is guaranteed to get around the restriction and give that method to others,
You should really read that “The optimal amount of fraud is non zero” blog post I linked above.
raxxorraxor 54 minutes ago [-]
Sorry, I don't want to involve the government in anything when I just want to communicate. It is a pretty simple request and it is not comparable to anything that can endanger others directly.
You don't need government ID to talk to people and share info. You don't need government ID to take a dump.
Also the criticism of the article is just ignored while it is a very likely development and lack of imagination isn't an excuse.
Even today government in the EU are already implementing mass surveillance, even by third parties.
Verification wasn't needed in the past, it won't be needed in the future.
Requiring an internet ID is the the opinion of a marginalised minority that has difficulties with technology. Aside from those that are advertisers of course.
jonathanstrange 2 hours ago [-]
First of all, the sane chip card design will not take place. That's virtually guaranteed. As a closely related example, banks all over the world have moved away from this design to merely trust the (nonexistent) security of mobile phones. Why? Costs and convenience.
Second, if you hand over a chip card, you still need to lock down and tightly control every executable on every machine. How else would you guarantee that kids cannot access content the government deems unsuitable for them?
Third, I still haven't seen a coherent argument why parents shouldn't be in charge of what content their children are allowed to consume. I'm not at all against governments providing free parental control software, for example, or voluntary industry standards similar to the movie ratings.
Finally, "protecting the children" is obviously a pretense. The sole purpose of the push for this is for governments to get the foot in the door of operating systems they currently can't control well. It's the starting point for a surveillance infrastructure: age verification -> digital ID verification -> tracking who said what and handing the data over to intelligence and law enforcement.
stymaar 2 hours ago [-]
> First of all, the sane chip card design will not take place. That's virtually guaranteed. As a closely related example, banks all over the world have moved away from this design to merely trust the (nonexistent) security of mobile phones. Why? Costs and convenience.
Businesses are always going to favor the cheapest options, but that's why regulation exist.
> Second, if you hand over a chip card, you still need to lock down and tightly control every executable on every machine. How else would you guarantee that kids cannot access content the government deems unsuitable for them?
You don't need to guarantee that. It's like saying you can't have an alcohol consumption ban on teenagers without spying on them all the time. It's technically true but it doesn't matter: having teenagers consume way less booze due to the rules than they would without it, and that's fine for most people, societies don't need to enforce an absolute 100% ban of things for bans to deliver the expected outcome.
> Third, I still haven't seen a coherent argument why parents shouldn't be in charge of what content their children are allowed to consume.
It's much less about what their children are allowed to consume, but what are businesses allowed to sell to their children. It's exactly like alcohol restrictions: the government don't raid houses to check if parents are letting child drink whine and beer at home, but it aggressively enforces that bars don't sell booze to teenagers.
> Finally, "protecting the children" is obviously a pretense.
Not from the electors. Most people are favorable to these things, and that's why these laws are voted. Obviously intelligence agencies are always trying to get access to more data whenever they can, but that's not the reason why these laws are voted, and the representatives routinely could vote for a version of that which doesn't serve any intelligence purpose.
stymaar 5 hours ago [-]
> This assumes good faith, which doesn't match reality. It's about control, not protecting children.
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
> Given your idea of a physical card, kids will find a way to use the card of their parents.
Sure there are kids who have access to their parents credit card with the PIN, but how frequent is that? In every system, fraud will exist, but that doesn't mean the system is worthless. “The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero”:
https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...
> “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
This is not an argument, it's just a stupid quip. And I would sooner suggest that you "never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by malice". Humans are overwhelmingly selfish and more than willing to harm others to serve themselves.
Telaneo 4 hours ago [-]
Given the amount of malice in the world, that's not even an unreasonable statement. Even more so if you agree that being in a position of power while not having the expertise needed to fulfil it is itself malicious.
The traditional quip works well on small-scale stuff, but if there's loads of money or power to be gained, malice and greed tends to be fairly prevalent.
vaylian 4 hours ago [-]
People fall through the cracks of the system. You suddenly can't use a digital service any more, because it requires you to use a specific technology that you can't obtain, even though you are old enough. You might be a refugee, you might be someone with special characters in their name or you might be someone from a country that simply doesn't provide recognized digital certifications. Or you might want to run a rooted operating system on your phone or computer.
nly 4 hours ago [-]
But to be effective you need to prove that the person presenting the ID is the person the ID belongs to.
In person that falls to a human being, and it's an easy and intuitive task that takes seconds.
On the internet this involves some kind of video recording being sent to some agency somewhere being paid a fee, who may later be asked to prove the efficacy of their service. This agency needs a digital copy of the photo from your ID for matching purposes. They'll be tempted to store this for auditing purposes... they'll also be tempted to store correlation IDs etc if the architecture allows.
The issue is trust. You just can't trust these first and third parties not to collaborate for commercial gain or at government demand or request.
And ultimately you're still exchanging verification at registration for a shareable credentials: I could use my ID to sign up to pornhub premium and then sell the username and password to a 16 year old if I wished, just like those buying alcohol can go and give it to the underage. A black market for digital credentials is even easier to establish than material goods
stymaar 3 hours ago [-]
> On the internet this involves some kind of video recording being sent to some agency somewhere being paid a fee, who may later be asked to prove the efficacy of their service. This agency needs a digital copy of the photo from your ID for matching purposes.
That's why I'm talking about an “Id card” using Zero-knowledge proofs in a cryptographic chip, not using a paper ID with your picture on top…
nly 3 hours ago [-]
Doesn't matter!
You still need to send a digital image from the id, signed by an authority, saying "this person is 18"
You then still need a trusted ID service or algorithm to capture an image of the user _at the time of use_ to compare that to.
Just having access to your digital ID credentials proves nothing
The zero knowledge proof only helps prevent tracking between the ID service and the website you're logging into. This is valuable but requires standardisation and client side support, which doesn't exist.
All the time the client side is implemented by JavaScript served from the server side you're just trusting these parties to behave and not snoop
Yeah...I'm fully aware what a ZKP is..you're just missing the point.
stymaar 2 hours ago [-]
Why did you write that then:
> You then still need a trusted ID service or algorithm to capture an image of the user _at the time of use_ to compare that to.
> Just having access to your digital ID credentials proves nothing
egorfine 4 hours ago [-]
It is a problem in itself. First they want to know your age (they're pretending: of course they want to know your identity, but let's leave that for a moment).
What's next? Your US legal status as determined by your ethnicity? Scan your face to prove you're white? Yeah, that sounds absolutely ridiculous but so did the age verification with KYC just a few years ago.
Rebuff5007 3 hours ago [-]
Why are those things naturally "whats next"?
We allow bars and car companies to verify age before conducting business. Does that in itself lead to racial discrimination? I think not.
usrnm 3 hours ago [-]
The issue is the scale and centralization of information. Let's imagine that every bar has to not only check the id of every customer but do it automatically: every time you enter a bar anywhere in the country you must have your id scanned by a government-issued system. Are you still ok with it?
Rebuff5007 27 minutes ago [-]
Sure why not. How is that any different that what already happens at airports?
stymaar 3 hours ago [-]
That's why we need privacy preserving designs.
But saying “we must abandon the idea of age verification in bar” is never going to work in any democratic setting.
Voters genuinely want to protect the children, without second thoughts.
jonathanstrange 2 hours ago [-]
Why do parental software / settings and filters not work? Aren't there even approaches based on whitelisting?
anax32 4 hours ago [-]
And it is focussed on social networks, which require an email address, which usually implies a device.
But instead of inserting controls around email addresses (as with paid services) or devices (as with contraband), the requirement is pushed to the application layer. It really makes no sense from a technical POV.
mdp2021 6 hours ago [-]
> and it would be perfectly fine
Unless a tiny chance exists that some system in the middle is not secure. Then you have the problem of those who orient their acceptance to the "oh well" shrug, and then systemic faults get downplayed by default. (Edit: I re-read and notice 'half-baked systems': seemingly, we agree.)
> as a political posture
Which is the core problem of masses accepting pseudo-heartly and not-brainy unacceptable figures. And again, systemic faults incarnated as administrations get downplayed by default.
g42gregory 5 hours ago [-]
"Age verification" is designed to attribute your identity to your online presence. As such, it's done just right.
romankolpak 2 hours ago [-]
What’s the alternative? How do you solve the problem of not allowing children into online spaces where they shouldn’t be allowed in?
Tade0 1 hours ago [-]
Parents who wish to have both the child and themselves remain sane are already watching over the way their offspring uses the internet.
Truth be told the worst kind of content is nominally child friendly - just incredibly addictive and overstimulating. We're all so preoccupied with preventing our children from looking at gore or porn or even meeting predators online that we forget that those who stand to make money on addictive content will pull every lever necessary.
philipallstar 2 hours ago [-]
We should assign one or two adults to children who provide for them, and prevent various dangers, including online ones, from reaching them. It sounds like a lot of effort, but it is also the most important task on the planet.
harshreality 1 hours ago [-]
A generation of kids have grown up with just such assigned adults, who overwhelmingly did not apply sufficient oversight to the kids' use of social media.
In large part that's because, if they'd done so, the kids would've been socially isolated from their peers, at least the most normal ones with the most normal parents, which are the kinds of friends most other normal parents want their kids to have.
It's a collective action problem, except instead of "I can be better off if I ignore what I know is best for society", it's "if I ignore what I know is best for my kids psychologically, they will still have friends, and social media brainrot is a lesser evil than socially isolating my kid from all the normal kids at school."
And also, giving kids social media interaction devices is a convenient form of babysitting. It reduces up-front effort of parenting.
big85 1 hours ago [-]
The existing paradigm is on-device parental controls. It's worked for the past 30 years, and the alternative is forcing everyone to show government ID to use websites.
rdiddly 5 hours ago [-]
Journalists are supposed to be helping the people by doing it.
miohtama 6 hours ago [-]
Most people just want to blame someone else of their problems
_pdp_ 3 hours ago [-]
You can exploit both ways.
HerbManic 5 hours ago [-]
And those that are keen to make some noise about it are labelled as being conspiracy minded or against the safety of children.
It causes a situation where because of the potential backlash, even if they are right, few people will come to the defense for fear of being ostracized as well.
basisword 3 hours ago [-]
>> If we taught systems thinking in schools things like internet age verification would never get past being an idea on the back of a napkin. People struggle to consider the second-, third-, and nth-order effects of anything
Does this not imply we also wouldn't get the internet because people would have considered the damage it would also cause?
microgpt 7 hours ago [-]
Almost anything can be a slippery slope to almost anything. We'd never get anything done.
delusional 5 hours ago [-]
I know systems thinking, and am in favor of a version of these types of legislation. Give me your best argument from systems thinking, and I'll give you a thoughtful reply.
jchanimal 5 hours ago [-]
The only reasonable solution shape I've seen is the one that trusts the parents to set an operating system setting that says whether or not the user is allowed to access adult content. And so it doesn't actually verify age, it just verifies parental intent.
HerbManic 5 hours ago [-]
The argument usually is that it is a slippery slope. Something that is introduced in the name of virtue ends up being co-opted into a system of control as those in power and peoples attitudes change with subsequent layers of normalization.
ball_of_lint 4 hours ago [-]
A significant part of the cultural value of the internet comes from free anonymous expression. As a key example, look at 4chan - anonymity taken to it's extreme has resulted in on one hand yes a lot of disgusting stuff, but also a cultural hotbed.
Age verification is de facto identity verification. Eff says it well:
> But no matter the method, every system demands users hand over sensitive and immutable personal information that links their offline identity to their online activity.
https://www.eff.org/issues/age-verification
Tying every action taken online to the user's real identity will have a deep and catastrophic chilling effect, destroying those very places that are creating our culture.
yamillove 7 hours ago [-]
Systems thinking?
Dude, more that 2 thirds of black kids can barely read [1]
That page says most kids can barely read. Are you a kid?
stavros 6 hours ago [-]
> Across student groups, average fourth-grade reading scores in 2022 were lower for the following student groups:
> [..]
> male and female students;
So reading scores were lower for everyone? Why single out groups?
yamillove 5 hours ago [-]
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yamillove 6 hours ago [-]
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thrance 2 hours ago [-]
That's by design. Bringing up any kind of systemic issues, or applying a materialist reasoning to anything will get you taxed with communism. This is a classic strategy of the capital class, and is at the foundation of neoliberalism. In Thatcher's own words:
> There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.
They have to keep the population blind to any kind of systemic thinking to rob them blind.
palata 6 hours ago [-]
> If we taught systems thinking in schools things like internet age verification would never get past being an idea on the back of a napkin.
What about climate change and the current mass extinction?
beezlewax 6 hours ago [-]
Yes those might be slightly more iimportant.
ElProlactin 8 hours ago [-]
> If we taught systems thinking in schools things like internet age verification would never get past being an idea on the back of a napkin.
But why would we do that?
If we taught people how to think, they wouldn't sit their toddlers down in front an iPad for 8+ hours a day to entertain (read: keep them occupied and quiet) them with YouTube videos, sign them up for a Facebook account before they could wipe their own butts, etc.
The sad irony of this age verification thing is that if we had a decent society and parents with common sense, age verification wouldn't even be a topic.
dozerly 8 hours ago [-]
Parents with common sense comes from teaching children common sense. You have to fix the child education issue first, a lot of adults are too far gone to educate at this point.
Synthetic7346 7 hours ago [-]
How can you fix the child education problem without fixing the parent education? School is but a few hours a day, and kids spend more time with parents and learn from them. I was lucky that my parents liked to read and encouraged me to read, but my friends didn't have the same exposure that I did and never liked to read books.
pfannkuchen 7 hours ago [-]
What? School is basically the same hours as a full time job. How is it but a few hours a day? Did you time travel from the 1800s?
samplifier 6 hours ago [-]
Indeed, and then after school care because both parents are still working until 6 pm, quietly eat dinner, watch cocomelon, and then to bed. Horror.
johnny22 7 hours ago [-]
I don't get why you would start there. Their parents probably didn't have youtube or ipads and they and/or their parents are the ones pushing it.
lyu07282 7 hours ago [-]
Uhh imagine you know about countries other than the US that implement age verification. Like the UK, Brazil, Australia, France, Spain, Italy and dozens of other countries with vastly different educational systems. Then perhaps you could begin to understand the magnitude of your own ignorance of actual power and political ideology. Instead of embarrassingly trying to reason yourself a political education from first principle.
Uh dumb law I don't like. Cause people dumb. If people not dumb, no dumb law. Uhh I am very smart. "Systems thinking" oh fucking hell stfu
Varelion 6 minutes ago [-]
Gonna repost this comment I made last week, as no one interacted with its core idea.
I am torn. I have bore first-hand witness to the scale of the PsyOps war waged on the American people by institutions near and far. Artroturfing to sew division to one means of another.
In all these operations, anonymity is what drives it.
I was born and raised in the anonymous internet, and tasted its freedoms. I oppose censorship. But, at this point, I have come to wonder it it would be best to always have your real-life personality attached to all you do. At least to any action that feeds an algorithm or creates something someone else can see.
It is the nature of the internet that you could never achieve absolute censorship -- and maybe anonymity should belong to the hackers and tinkers with the will and drive to hunt and craft for it.
I do not like holding this opinion, because it feels as though it is on the similar boat as that of those who 'pull up the ladder after themselves'. Increasingly, I see it as pulling shut the trapdoors to hell.
P.S. This goes without saying -- it's also the only was to defend against "ai" bots.
lotsofpulp 3 minutes ago [-]
>But, at this point, I have come to wonder it it would be best to always have your real-life personality attached to all you do.
I also had similar thoughts to you, but seeing the election results of the previous decade in the US makes me question the premise.
RachelF 7 hours ago [-]
Age verification is just one part of this crackdown.
Device attestation is another - making sure you're using an unmodified government approved operating system and apps linked to your ID.
matheusmoreira 5 hours ago [-]
One day we'll need remote attestation to even get an internet connection. "Untrusted" devices that have been "tampered with" need not apply.
Little by little, everything I hold dear is getting destroyed. Computers of our own, that we control, that we can freely hack on. Everything the word "hacker" stands for. How I wish I could turn back the clock...
gherkinnn 4 hours ago [-]
And always have that phone on you at all times please.
This goes way beyond any notion of a "hacker tweaking his electronics".
With ID checks, device attestation and a device required for any transaction, and all this data piped in to a central brain (none of which are far fetched), we're all pretty much buggered.
It is a matter of time until advertising companies claw their way in, insurances calculate individual premiums based on behaviour, and remember, we're all one legislation away from being governed by lunatics.
echelon 37 minutes ago [-]
Just wait for the brain scan tech to pan out.
They'll call you in for a routine scan of your thoughts to make sure you haven't been up to any wrongthink.
Ouman 2 hours ago [-]
Age verification is the visible, easy-to-sell layer. Device attestation is the more structural one...
ranyume 6 hours ago [-]
AI mass surveillance is another. The powerful are just ceasing opportunities to accumulate power and capital, seeing that right now it is not good enough for them.
morganf 48 minutes ago [-]
I think you mean "seizing". "Ceasing opportunities" means the precise opposite of what I think you intend to say.
shevy-java 6 hours ago [-]
> making sure you're using an unmodified government approved operating system
Will be interesting to see if this leads to more Linux systems being deployed. Then again with systemd supporting age sniffing (https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40954), evading this becomes harder and harder.
Why would it? Such a government would just... not approve Linux, if it interfered with their objectives.
Klonoar 4 hours ago [-]
Systemd changes don’t make it harder, you control the damn OS at the source code level if you choose.
M95D 2 hours ago [-]
Theoretically, yes, but Gentoo with all their resources couldn't keep even eudev alive. How much free time does one person need to maintain a fork of the entire systemd?
darkwater 6 hours ago [-]
Evading what exactly? If the age verification is a flag sent by the OS and you are the OS administrator, you can do whatever you want.
firefoxd 8 hours ago [-]
It gives a new spin to:
> Everything you say CAN and WILL be used against you.
Especially when what you said has already been recorded and tied to your identity before you faced the authorities.
As the internet become the place where people do a lot of things, no government (and especially no security services) will be able to keep themselves from trying to control it or at least monitor it.
And with the new LLM features they can automatically do much more than before.
Human nature is a constant and when the government sees an easy way to enforce something, many more bureaucrats will try to do it.
TrackerFF 3 hours ago [-]
In the intel industry, it is known that metadata is more or less enough to identify people. That's state/military intel. Several countries have already implemented bulk acquisition / collection of data that "crosses the borders", which is a ridiculous concept.
If you're located in, say, Norway - and send someone who is also located in Norway a message via Messenger, there's a good likelihood that message will go to some foreign located Meta server, and back to Norway.
When this was being implemented, there was some noise and protests from experts, but that's about it. For the general population it went quietly and without notice.
knollimar 1 hours ago [-]
Isn't that the point of e2e encryption? Maybe I have a privileged US take but I've always not cared much for a border crossing in a round trip. It always seemed like a needless expense to have a full vertical server stack in each country to me.
Wondering if someone can explain the logic
iamflimflam1 7 hours ago [-]
This is already happening if you want to visit the US. Customs officers will look at your social media accounts to make sure you are compliant.
raffael_de 54 minutes ago [-]
surveillance of foreigners (particularly) with residence in a different country is a different issue from surveillance of own citizens.
microgpt 7 hours ago [-]
And if you say you don't have any, they'll assume you're lying and deny you.
ranyume 6 hours ago [-]
It's good that I don't have any reason to go to the US.
a96 4 hours ago [-]
As you can see, it's quickly coming to other countries near you.
HerbManic 5 hours ago [-]
I have wondered that. I have this one and a very VERY bland Facebook that I post something stupid on every 12 months or so. So in a strange way I have accidentally shielded myself.
boomskats 2 hours ago [-]
I'm honestly amazed that people are only just figuring this out.
I know that reads like I'm being snarky, but I'm not trying to be. Within the last decade in the UK we have had (among others):
- the 2016 Snoopers' Charter
- the 2022 Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act
- the 2023 Public Order Act
- the 2023 Online Safety Act
- the 2024 Addendum to the 2016 Snoopers' Charter
Couple that with the whole push to repeal the 1998 Human Rights Act and withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights, and the fact we've started imprisoning pensioners for holding up signs, and it's really difficult to _not_ see exactly where this leaves us.
I wish I could look away and get on with my life, but I can't - and I'm starting to realise that that is also part of the design. The increasing reluctance to express controversial opinion online isn't an accidental side effect of all of this legislation. It is intended behaviour, the desired outcome.
mawadev 6 hours ago [-]
If you look at how workers are mistreated in authoritarian corporations and how some people say it is perfectly fine because you get paid a lot of money to be used and abused, I can't imagine what a reality like this would look like. It does not stop with what you post online, we still can't really tell how our phones know about stuff we talk about irl to serve ads.
btbuildem 7 hours ago [-]
This is a reminder to curate and prune all your past social media contribution, because when this goes thru, you KNOW they will apply it retroactively. You'd loathe to lose your cushy job over a moment of lucid honesty back in 2011.
microgpt 7 hours ago [-]
It's already too late for that but you can at least, by deleting now, reduce the chances they see it.
kgwxd 56 minutes ago [-]
Not your HN account though. They even stopped replying to my annual emails asking if it's "possible" yet. They originally help me change the name, and scrub any replies that mentioned the original name. That's not enough though, thanks to old copies of the site data that still have my original name, linked directly to the real HN post it appears on, showing up in search results.
microgpt 44 minutes ago [-]
If you're in Europe, you can sue them under GDPR? They won't obey - HN explicitly chooses to disobey European laws - but having an arrest warrant out might be inconvenient enough for them to do it anyway.
jay_kyburz 6 hours ago [-]
I've been posting under my real name for over 20 years because this was always going to be the case. Using my real name is a constant reminder to not to post things I might later regret.
jay_kyburz 4 hours ago [-]
sigh, another typo on my permanent record.
kgwxd 51 minutes ago [-]
For interpersonal discussion, it's a great way to keep yourself in check. For activism and journalism, that's exactly what "they" want from you. They'd rather you self censor, and live in fear of even just criticizing them by utilizing you own good reputation.
remarkEon 6 hours ago [-]
I haven’t had any social media accounts since I gave it up for Lent in 2018 and I’m increasingly starting to wonder if that’s a liability for me because there’s no social graph that whatever agency would otherwise use to, idk, confirm I’m not a threat or something. The lack of a digital footprint like that may look weird.
weberer 3 hours ago [-]
What do you consider social media? Because I'd definitely classify this site as one.
zarzavat 8 hours ago [-]
I don't like age verification. However I'm not concerned about it.
The internet needs new spaces that are more decentralized and less in bed with governments.
We already lost our freedom when we agreed to move from IRC to Discord, from phpBB to Reddit, etc.
The teenagers who are blocked from mainstream social media will deliver us new free online spaces that are better than what they're blocked from.
pibaker 7 hours ago [-]
What happens when federal agents kick down your front door because you ran a free range mom and pop BBS that did not comply with latest ID verification requirements?
Big companies will benefit the most from these regulations. It's just good ol regulatory capture. They will have the most resources to comply with the laws. They have a captive audience that will be more willing to give up their personal info when asked — keep in mind Facebook and instagram is widely used for business. It is your small time forum admin who would rather shut down his hobbyist online community that never made him any money anyway than to ask for IDs. We have already seen stories of websites shutting down due to existing UK regulations. Curiously, all small, personal operations, not the kind of corporate social media they tell you the laws are meant to target.
zarzavat 7 hours ago [-]
It seems unlikely that running a website without age verification will be illegal across the entire planet.
pibaker 5 hours ago [-]
So if you want to run a BBS for say vintage motorcycle owners, you have to move to a country without such laws and make sure to never set foot in any country that does?
alt227 4 hours ago [-]
No, you just have to host it there and use a VPN. Like all piracy sites are done right now.
lopis 1 hours ago [-]
Oh oh. You ISP has detected non sanctioned use of an unauthorized VPN service. The police is on its way.
vaylian 1 hours ago [-]
If privacy is outlawed, only outlaws will have privacy.
vasco 7 hours ago [-]
It seemed unlikely to me that cookie banners would be a thing across the whole internet if nothing else because no website operators would put them in. How wrong was I.
All they need to do is popularize the idea of "if your website doesn't do X, it'll place lower on google" and people will do anything.
My websites still don't have cookie banners and the police still hasn't come to my house. And the websites uses cookies like every other website always did.
CalRobert 6 hours ago [-]
Ironically 99% of them don’t meet legal requirements. They serve no purpose.
hdgvhicv 6 hours ago [-]
The purpose is to make people think laws like gdpr are bad for people, rather than bad for the surveillance industry.
microgpt 7 hours ago [-]
Cookie banners aren't across the whole internet.
Nursie 6 hours ago [-]
You really only need the banners if you're doing privacy-impinging things.
Much like the GDPR notices that a small industry of 'compliance' product companies sold seemingly to everyone as necessary, they aren't if you're only using cookies for functional reasons and not tracking people. Unfortunately that leads to lower margins for advertisers and we can't have that.
microgpt 7 hours ago [-]
If you violate memory protection you get a segfault, consistently. That isn't how the law works. Federal agents only kick down your door if they want to - which in this case probably means your forum users disparaged ICE or Trump.
watwut 7 hours ago [-]
I mean, social networks already made genocide happen. They they were instrumental in the curren winning march of fascism - in USA, in EU in Asia.
pibaker 5 hours ago [-]
This is why China and Russia are shiny beacons of democracy and liberalism — they heavily regulate their social media!
Seriously, do people not look at history or at least the world around them when they make such claims? Genocides have happened before we had internet, or TV, or radio, or any modern technology people attribute genocides to. Hatred and violence are parts of human nature and trying to blame it on technology is just us trying not to make ourselves look bad.
watwut 3 hours ago [-]
My point is, the "what happens when federal agents kick down your front" thing is already happening and happened. And curiously, tech libertarians ranting about the freedom were facilitating every single step along the way, actively helping those every single step along the way.
> Genocides have happened before we had internet, or TV, or radio, or any modern technology people attribute genocides to.
Genocides became more frequent every since we have technology. Technology facilitates genocides. Both by creating actual means of killing (industrial killing in WWII) and by creating conditions for distribution of "work". Radio specifically was instrumental in Rwanda.
josteink 7 hours ago [-]
That’s a very dramatic take - and I dare say a counter-factual one too.
Which actual genocide would you be talking about?
I really don’t think people should water out words like that over what is essentially tiny political differences.
Facebook has said it agrees with a report that found it had failed to prevent its platform being used to "incite offline violence" in Myanmar.
The independent report, commissioned by Facebook, said the platform had created an "enabling environment" for the proliferation of human rights abuse.
It comes after widespread violence against the Rohingya minority which the UN has said may amount to genocide.
watwut 4 hours ago [-]
> I really don’t think people should water out words like that over what is essentially tiny political differences.
I really don’t think people should minimize actual historical and current events for political purposes. Knee jerk "bad things are inconvenient, therefore they did not happened" denial is how we got here.
> essentially tiny political differences
The political differences between actual fascism that is on the rise, its actual opposition and those in between are large. Not small. Also, in more recent events there were pogroms in Belfast now. Elon Musk personally contributed to their incitement.
rockskon 7 hours ago [-]
Such spaces will never scale if there's widespread legal prohibitions.
It is foolish to assume we can innovate our way around the law as opposed to talking with lawmakers to oppose the law before it gets on the books.
fyredge 4 hours ago [-]
And they absolutely should not scale. Scaling is the root cause of all social media ills. If all you see are the 100 people nearest to you, the village idiot will not be able to spread his gospel so easily
rockskon 4 hours ago [-]
The social media you don't want will continue to scale.
fyredge 3 hours ago [-]
Right, and therefore we regulate them
rockskon 2 hours ago [-]
And what sort of regulations did you have in mind that don't primarily punish the users?
kjshsh123 7 hours ago [-]
That sounds like mistaken optimism due to a mistaken interpretation of the invisible hand.
Mandating age verification and the inevitable implementation requirements are bad for freedom.
Behaviour changes and innovations will mitigate some of the negatives, but bad things are bad.
Gigachad 7 hours ago [-]
What we need is more personal spaces. Less feeds, more small group chats with people you actually know. I'm totally fine with destroying Reddit/Twitter/etc
tancop 3 hours ago [-]
i want more feeds than centralized services can ever have. on bluesky youre not limited to fyp and following you can install literally hundreds of options. almost all of them are open source and self hostable.
theres a place for group chats and tight communities but we also need global spaces where you can reach anyone. you cant promote your new album or start organizing a union or share some really good pics with the world if all you have is individual servers.
> Conclusions: Despite the intent of the Social Media Minimum Age Act 2024 to delay access to social media platforms and reduce the potential for online harms, little evidence was found of immediate substantive reductions in reported social media use by adolescents under 16 years.
We are training teenagers that laws are stupid and can be circumvented easily and without consequences. As well as continuing to subject them to the harms of social media, only now without any means of monitoring them or holding the social media companies responsible.
tompagenet2 5 hours ago [-]
The law doesn't make it a crime for children to access social media, but for the companies that provided it to allow that child to access it.
Havoc 4 hours ago [-]
The only thing teenagers are delivering is doomscrolling addiction. Seems improper me that the revert to something like irc en mass
pineapple_opus 7 hours ago [-]
They already have started right ? Like example - bluesky (bsky.social)
vasco 7 hours ago [-]
This is like saying you're not concerned about war because people will notice war is bad and stop doing it. It's not a smart position to hold that bad things are good because they may bring on reversals.
gigel82 7 hours ago [-]
You do realize the next step is ISP-level tagging of traffic? And VPNs are already being outlawed in much of the western world.
Unless you expect the teenagers to run underground mesh radio networks and risk FCC's hammer (real jailtime), it's just wishful thinking.
kulahan 7 hours ago [-]
I don’t expect teenagers to do anything but largely be harmed by the internet.
stretchwithme 7 hours ago [-]
Maybe it should be possible for a parent to set a child age in a device.
Everyone else can stay anonymous.
I look forward to hearing why that won't work and what problems it will cause.
big85 1 hours ago [-]
Parental controls. Client-side blocking of content. Apple's parental controls are so good that parents give young children unsupervised internet access--the entire generation if iPad babies. Current iPads even use on-device AI to detect nudity in photos and prevent them from being taken, sent, recieved, or viewed.
microgpt 7 hours ago [-]
You're describing California AB1043 which passed a few months ago and is now the law in California. We all got very angry about it when it passed.
1 hours ago [-]
vasco 7 hours ago [-]
How does the parent prove they are the parent. All you need is to think about the next step, come on now.
kulahan 7 hours ago [-]
…upon device purchase? Very obviously?
vasco 7 hours ago [-]
The verification is not done per device but per usage session.
microgpt 7 hours ago [-]
Why are you telling someone else how their hypothetical implementation works?
vasco 6 hours ago [-]
There's no hypothetical, they tried to equate this to basically buying a gun where you do the certification on purchase. Internet connected devices are not planned to be controlled like that but per session. Under that model what they proposed is obviously not going to work.
kulahan 6 hours ago [-]
Comment 1: “maybe it should be this way”
Comment 2: “it can’t be that way because of this”
Comment 3: “but it can, because it could maybe be this way”
You: “There was no hypothetical”
Oh my god the comments are getting so stupid. Please, I beg you to stop.
microgpt 3 hours ago [-]
The existing California law that passed a few months ago makes it per user account
kulahan 6 hours ago [-]
This is incorrect, and you have failed to read my mind on how it works. Extremely weird attempt, but I applaud the bravado anyways.
aichi 8 minutes ago [-]
... use Monero. Why author didn't start with this claim? Intention would be more clear
initramfs 8 hours ago [-]
"The Carnival in Venice was first documented in 1296, with a proclamation by the Venetian Senate announcing a public festival the day before the start of Lent. Unquestionably one of the most well-known Carnival festivities in the world, the Carnival of Venice is rife with mystery, adventure, and conspiracy. The day served to break down barriers between people of different economic standings and religious beliefs. During the Renaissance, masked comic performers performed in Venice's piazzas."
"The tradition of wearing masks seems to stem from the 13th century. During the ages the Venetians disguised themselves with mask whenever they thought necessary. It allowed them to escape from the rigid rules of the class hierarchy. All classes could mingle, men could be women, women could be men. It also led to unwanted behaviour, from throwing eggs filled with ink to all imaginable kinds of vulgarities. Masks made people unrecognisable, so they could not be prosecuted.
Near the end of the Republic, the right to wear masks in daily life was severely restricted. By the 18th century, it was limited to three months starting at December 26 and ending on the last day of Carnival, Shrove Tuesday. Masks were also used in ceremonies, eg. when ambassadors arrived and at the five ritual grand banquets offered each year to Venetian dignitaries by the doge. This resembles the Masquerade Balls during Carnival nowadays. Venetian noblemen and noblewomen wore a costume called a bautta consisting of a white mask (volto), a tricorn hat (tricorno), a hood worn under the hat (zendale) and a tabarro, a loose-fitting cloak. There were subtle differences between noble and non-noble (cittadini or popolani), and the popolani were known to wear more colorful, fun masks to festivities like the bull runs."
Mask in real life then, mask in social internet now. Meaning stays the same. I like this analogy.
FergusArgyll 45 minutes ago [-]
Techies have a real blind spot here. This stuff is very popular, like bipartisan support popular. Yes, it's a precursor to terrible things and they will happen but you have to convince people the the harms outweigh the benefits. Just asking "Why can't they tell the point of this" is not helpful or true. "The point of this" is decided by those pushing it, those pushing it are not politicians, they're parents and they're pushing it because they're scared of social media, not because they want to censor you.
You need to explain to and convince those parents that this will result in something worse.
triceratops 8 hours ago [-]
"Don't let them win. Don't verify your age. Don't give up your identity. If you absolutely must, find one of the numerous age verification services and pay in Monero."
Better yet, how about - "call your representatives"?
Some nerds, for lack of a better term, think crypto and cryptography are the answers to every privacy problem. The only way to fix society and the law is by engaging with those things. Not sidestepping them with cryptography, an unscalable approach in any case.
I'm deeply pessimistic about the future. The only group competent enough to oppose identity verification has its head in the sand.
dopidopHN2 8 hours ago [-]
Have you been to a city council meeting lately ? Ever?
I'm trying to push for surveillance regulation where I live. I'm there monthly.
Calling your representative is the best way to realise that they don't give a fuck.
Yesterday I was editing a clip of one of them lying overtly.
It will be a minor inconveniences.
what we call democracy is a dog and ponies show.
So maybe cryptography is not that ridiculous, after all
godwinson__4-8 7 hours ago [-]
Of course the system has a rather obvious remediation for that. You could also run for office or find a kindred spirit to support.
Trying to one to one with a representative or a council just sends them a signal to not care. You're one of n constituents. Showing up to the city council meeting without bringing an exponential curve of people with you over a short enough amount of time in support of your cause simply confirms to your representatives your cause is marginal.
If you are already cutting clips you might as well bite the bullet and run for office. Best of luck with your foray in democracy!
rockskon 7 hours ago [-]
Not every lawmaker is the same and there's more than one way to get a lawmaker's attention.
Get more people with you. Or convince a group that's previously established trust in your jurisdiction to join you in speaking out. Or find out what causes the policymakers do care about and think of a compelling way to frame arguments against age verification in those terms. Heck - if you can get a local government agency to officially back you up, all the better.
There's more to politics than just going to town hall meetings or sending emails or making phone calls!
triceratops 8 hours ago [-]
> Calling your representative is the best way to realise that they don't give a fuck
That just means not enough people did it.
> So maybe cryptography is not that ridiculous, after all
Until they make that illegal. What'll you do then?
It. Doesn't. Scale.
rockskon 7 hours ago [-]
Law alone cannot fix it. Tech alone cannot fix it.
If we wish to preserve the values we grew up with, we need both.
microgpt 7 hours ago [-]
Law can fix 90% of it. Tech can fix 10%.
rockskon 6 hours ago [-]
As cynical as it sounds given its frequent use in marketing and often inappropriate use in legal circles, securing what data is collected is important too.
Raise the bar for a data breach. It has value. Much more value if the law did a much better job of restricting what is collected in the first place and its dissemination.
microgpt 6 hours ago [-]
Punishing companies for data breaches will solve more data breaches than any amount of encryption.
rockskon 5 hours ago [-]
I find that particularly unrealistic that we can arrive at a good place solely by fining companies for data breaches.
microgpt 3 hours ago [-]
Seems to mostly work in Europe. Did you know that a European person's advertising tracking data is the most expensive because it's so hard to get?
aucisson_masque 6 hours ago [-]
If I say something illegal during a meeting, people will notice it and will report it to the police. Then I may get arrested or fined.
Why should it be different on the internet ? Provided we live in countries where freedom of speech is enacted.
Of course in Russia or china it's different but surely they already have tools like that.
phrotoma 3 hours ago [-]
It's not different on the internet. If you commit a crime on the internet it's still illegal and it can still be reported to the police.
What makes you suggest otherwise?
ludicrousdispla 2 hours ago [-]
How do you "say something illegal" ?
febusravenga 5 hours ago [-]
Its not about saying illegal things. It's mostly about saying things that can get you canceled in future in future culture.
Dark jokes and strong opinions are example - you something filthy - let's say dark Holocaust/Nazi joke but funny in situation In group that accept it and it's ok. But if it's recorded, it'll stay forever and will surface in most unexpected moment, like job interview or some other screening by gov/corpos.
Don't say that dirty jokes should be punished in future if in given situation they were received as ok and only later someone else, not in situation is going to judge it
pprotas 3 hours ago [-]
Are you arguing that Holocaust/Nazi jokes should be accepted socially, as long as you only deliver them to people who respond positively to Holocaust/Nazi jokes?
Findecanor 2 hours ago [-]
The world is not black and white and simple. Things could be taken out of context, and people tend to project.
People have got into trouble for having retold a controversial joke that they had heard, when the reason they retold had been because they themselves had been upset about it.
I too don't think that holocaust jokes should be accepted, but sometimes people say things because they don't know better at the time. There have been cases of people retelling "dog whistles" without having understood their contextual meaning for certain groups.
I've even seen politicians use the phrase "Works sets you free" without understanding why it is inappropriate.
People learn and change, but old posts can linger on the Internet for a long time.
mawadev 6 hours ago [-]
What if your phone listens to you all the time so it can detect "ok google" or "alexa" 24/7 but you happen to say something illegal with your device ID?
What if you brain storm a book/plot idea with a friend aloud and moments later the police knocks on your door because some system said you are about to commit a crime?
kelseyfrog 6 hours ago [-]
What if your neuralink reports unacceptable thoughts to the police?
stavros 6 hours ago [-]
Because perfect law enforcement means society can never change. Imagine if, back when it was illegal to be gay, every gay person was immediately sentenced. Do you think we'd be accepting homosexuality today?
fyredge 4 hours ago [-]
Yes, because the zeitgeist still changes regardless of enforcement. If all gay people were sentenced purely for their sexuality and nothing else, how long do you think it will take for ordinary folk to change their view? I reckon not long, unless the society is completely devoid of empathy and justice.
stavros 3 hours ago [-]
If you think that a society that actively harassed and persecuted homosexuals would spontaneously take pity on them, we have such different understandings on the world that debate can't be productive.
fyredge 2 hours ago [-]
Then I'm disappointed that you would think that way. Change is the only constant, in people, in societies, in politics. Change can be spontaneous, but more of then than not, it is slow, gradual, boring, but still change nonetheless. Would you concede to that?
stavros 2 hours ago [-]
Change doesn't happen by itself. If you take all the people who want the change and put them in prison, nothing will change.
matheusmoreira 5 hours ago [-]
> If I say something illegal
A situation that should be impossible due to freedom of speech.
Aramgutang 4 hours ago [-]
Here are some crimes you can commit by speaking, where freedom of speech cannot be used as a defence:
- assault / terror threats
- extortion / blackmail
- fraud
- conspiracy / solicitation to commit a crime
- treason / sedition
- perjury
- slander
DharmaPolice 4 minutes ago [-]
Slander isn't a crime in most places.
14 6 hours ago [-]
Because it has been shown that even if freedom is speech is a right that people will still be afraid to speak up if they know they are being monitored. Because the reality is that even if you are allowed to speak you might still be punished through other means.
This is much bigger than saying something illegal on the internet. This is about not being able to criticize your government without fear of retribution. Or how about if this was possible 60 years ago. Gays would have been all caught and gay rights never emerged. Or say you are discussing wanting an abortion and are arrested for arrested for it because at that point in time it is made illegal.
The right to have private communication is integral to a free and democratic society.
Morals change. Beliefs change. This is good. If you are monitored for everything we will be oppressed and stuck with no way to progress and grow.
nullorempty 4 hours ago [-]
I feel we are there already.
The weather is a bit rainy now but there is sun in the forecast for afternoon.
^^^ that is all we have left to discuss already in personal conversations at work anyways.
wuyuan 8 hours ago [-]
You're right. Many countries use the protection of minors as an excuse, but in reality, they just want to strengthen the regulation of speech.
microgpt 7 hours ago [-]
We should actually protect minors, then they won't be able to use it as an excuse. Right now it works as an excuse because minors are being harmed by the unrestricted internet, mostly by social media.
m0unta1ntube 5 hours ago [-]
They will always bring up a fringe matter to prove that statement wrong, no matter how much you will protect minors, someone else will still harm them and that is enough to justify these actions
jorisw 3 hours ago [-]
> they just want
Because you know their motivations. You've spoken to 'them'.
sixsupersoup 8 hours ago [-]
Automated fines, like traffic radar control for free speech, will also become a norm as they won't be able to put everyone in jail.
But I'm not sure the liberal anarcho-tyranny power will be indefinitely immutable. Speech control might be one their last try to keep control in the west. They will crumble like soviet union.
microgpt 7 hours ago [-]
They have this in Germany for copyright. If you torrent, you automatically get a fine letter in your email. If you don't pay, you get a court summons in the post. If you take it to court, you will lose that case and also have to pay court fees.
Nursie 6 hours ago [-]
It's funny how this played out in different countries.
In Australia there is no chance of anything happening, because the courts ruled that payouts were limited to provable incurred losses. You pirated a movie? The maximum awarded at the end of a court case is going to be about $20, and as you can't buy very much lawyer-time for $20, it's never taken to court and the copyright-holders have effectively stopped pursuing people here.
microgpt 6 hours ago [-]
I imagine they still go after prolific totrenters
threeshells 6 hours ago [-]
Imagine a machine mounted on the wall that prints you a ticket every time you swear
anon-3988 7 hours ago [-]
Right now, our identity is kinda tied to a string of letter (password). This password can technically be passed around, created and destroyed at will. Tomorrow, our identity is going to be tied to you as a person. So messages will be signed by YOU as a person.
h4kunamata 5 hours ago [-]
Age verification is an excuse to hide the fact that parents have become useless and should have their rights of becoming parents revoked.
If you ask any millenial, none of this bs existed during our time, parents wouldn't think twice to educate you, if you know you know haha
That statement is weird in itself because said parents are yesterday's millenial.
Add to that how companies and governments are trying to become a China. You cannot silence those that you don't know who they are.
Ohh did you say something a politician or a cop didn't like??? Now they can hunt you down and force you to delete the post or whatever.
Sci-fi movies are no longer just si-fi movies, it is easier than never to:
1. Know how you are and all the consequence behind that
2. Be a victim of identity theft. Look at how many millions of personal information including passports have been leaked into the dark web. In 2026, if you have the right skill and like doing the wrong thing, you can be anyone because their name, address, phone, photo, passporte, everything, is right there.
What gives me peace of mind is that by the time everything goes to shit, I am not longer in this world lmao haha
alt227 4 hours ago [-]
> Ohh did you say something a politician or a cop didn't like??? Now they can hunt you down and force you to delete the post or whatever.
Thats not true, as displayed by the recent Afroman case.
> should have their rights of becoming parents revoked.
Ok. So what does it mean to revoke the right for someone to become parents? Be honest and be specific.
5 hours ago [-]
NoPicklez 7 hours ago [-]
> These "age verification" laws are - by design - identity attribution systems. They attribute digital identities (accounts) to physical identities (SSN, ID, etc..). This is government's ideal situation, the ability to quickly (automatically?) get identifying information about inconvenient people regardless if they're a criminal or not.
I'll call it out because your article doesn't, but does reference Australia. Here our eSafety commissioner has set the requirements such that the use of Government ID for verification must not be the only option.
There are other age verification technologies that do not assign identity but use other means as a method to identify age. For example, when our ban came into play I wasn't all of a sudden required to offer my ID.
KaiserPro 4 hours ago [-]
Point number 2 doesn't take that long and is largely automated.
This is the thing that so upsetting with the discourse. Privacy is already eroded, its just by private companies, not the state. All social networks have a gateway for law enforcement that allows getting extra details about users.
There is another gateway with ISPs to correlate IPs with end users.
In the USA you can just buy most of that info through brokers.
Sure, people who takes precautions it takes extra work, but for dave on facebook, its pretty automatic.
I really wish people would foccus on that bit, because the way to get privacy back is to get a handle on social media companies(and google). They are the ones who've eroded our privacy, and if we just say "Oooo age gating is bad mmkay" without a viable alternative, then we'll all get something worse.
The solution is to limit what social media companies can profit from, so _they_ can regulate what shit they put in front of kids eyes. They can totally do it (after all how much porn is actually hosted on youtube? its really really hard, because they put in place systems to stop it.)
Garlef 5 hours ago [-]
The bad thing about this:
Can you trust future governments to respect "Nulla poena sine lege"?
bluegatty 8 hours ago [-]
The author made an assertive statement without any hint of rhetoric, reasoning, historical parallel, evidence, legislative example etc.
LandenLove 8 hours ago [-]
My theory is that age verification is just another way to push human verification. These large tech companies need a way to verify a user is a real person and not an AI bot. Both for displaying ads to real users and cutting down on spam.
Nobody would support a "give away my anonymity online so I can be shown an ad for Coca Cola" bill. But it's easier to sell a law to boomers and lawmakers if you use the disguise of "It's for the children ." As if any of these companies care about the well being of children. See Meta confirming their platforms affect the mental health of children and doing nothing about it. Also platforms like TikTok and YouTube optimizing their algorithms for stealing user's attention spans.
try-working 7 hours ago [-]
many platform companies probably do not want to verify that a user is real, except in certain niche cases, as bots help them pump their numbers.
tryauuum 6 hours ago [-]
The ad companies I think would want the opposite
If they cannot distinguish real people from bots they can just charge more for more ads shown !
4 hours ago [-]
maigret 6 hours ago [-]
Indeed a lot of social media platforms are used by foreign powers to create discord. Human psychology is much more attentive to negative messages and this is too easy to weaponize. A solution against that would probably be world changing. It would have to preserve anonymity still of course.
microgpt 6 hours ago [-]
That's why recaptcha is now doing human verification via mobile phone QR scan
msy 4 hours ago [-]
I find myself in an odd predicament. For nearly all my life I would have seen all of this as an unconscionable anathema. But having watched what social media has done to our society, the tsunami of bullshit collapsing critical thought, science and reason I just don’t think civilisation can survive this without controls. Too many people are too gullible, too uncritical for it to survive without the state being able to curtail harmful speech at scale. Do I hate it? Absolutely. But I hate the alternative more. And I want the bounds of acceptable speech to be decided by my democratically elected government, not a bunch of American billionaires determined to burn society to the ground so they can pan the ashes for yet more gold.
shakna 4 hours ago [-]
Wouldn't it be better to curtail social media's addictive design choices, and improve things for everyone, rather than force the audience to carry the weight of responsibility?
bcjdjsndon 1 hours ago [-]
> Wouldn't it be better to curtail social media's addictive design choices
Hacker news has a doomscroll front page. Ive never notice you have a problem with it
shakna 25 minutes ago [-]
HN specifically does not. You have to click "more", leading to most people not moving beyond two or three pages, rather than infinite scrolling.
plastic-enjoyer 3 hours ago [-]
The problem isn't social media per se, but rather how social media is designed, and this design is driven by profits and big tech. There are, at least in Europe, no alternatives to the big social media platforms.
I'm not too keen on social media bans, because this neither elimates the desire for social media, nor social media in itself.
Pragmata 3 hours ago [-]
>But having watched what social media has done to our society, the tsunami of bullshit collapsing critical thought, science and reason I just don’t think civilisation can survive this without controls.
None of this is new. Every single one of these things has been pointed out millennia ago.
You had already evaluated it and made your decision (against censorship) on this decades ago when you first came across it.
Changing your view now isn't a matter of new information coming to light. It's a matter of you disliking the obvious and inevitable consequences that you had been warned of going into it.
Perhaps it's time you stop changing your mind based on totalitarian propaganda and realize you don't know what you're doing, and stop supporting censorship.
SwellJoe 5 hours ago [-]
It's also a huge gift to the very surveillance capitalists they're pretending to protect children from. It de-anonymizes everyone, including children, and with the first exploit and dump of of the database (which will absolutely happen), all those children's real identities will be known to every predator in the world in addition to the social media companies who've already shown they can't be trusted with personal data or the ability to track people across the internet.
It is a catastrophically dangerous idea, and it's exactly what the abusive social media companies want.
uwagar 1 hours ago [-]
age verificiation is throttling of speech. so the internet becomes again like TV or newspaper. u can transmit with license only. not anonymously.
sunshine-o 2 hours ago [-]
The irony is AI already have more freedom of speech and maybe reach compared to humans in most "western democracies".
nephihaha 3 hours ago [-]
I feel we are preaching to the choir here. How do we get this message out to the wider population when it's being corralled so much?
I think this Cloudflare business ties into it, although it is masquerading as bot protection.
NoPicklez 7 hours ago [-]
I think you can look at all things pessimistically, like this article does but at the end of the day we all agree that there are things online we don't want our kids seeing or engaging with and it takes regulators to push how we protect them from those online places. What other options to regulators have?
Age restriction has been around for longer than the internet itself, so its regulators applying that logic to the online world.
Whilst I think age verification has its issues, I don't see what other options they actually have. I'll also make the point that in Australia, our regulations explicitly require that Government ID verification CANNOT be the only way and that companies must adopt an additional approach.
Almost everything in technology used to protect us can be used against us by those want or choosing to do the wrong thing, does that mean we don't do anything?
ball_of_lint 4 hours ago [-]
Why do you or anyone besides me (and my partner) get to decide what is ok for my kid to see?
If you want your kids to not see porn on the internet, cool. Don't give them Internet access. You don't need to make the internet worse for me and my family to make that rule for your family.
And maybe if you are parenting your child well, at some point you will be able to trust them to use the internet in a responsible way.
microgpt 7 hours ago [-]
I like the California law where the device owner sets the parental controls and apps have to obey them or get fined.
Nursie 6 hours ago [-]
Yep, there are all sorts of technically interesting ways in which age can be proven without identity being compromised, this link has a good exploration of anonymous credentials, for a start - https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2026/03/02/anonymou...
And there are all sorts of reasons governments want to do this, up to and including the stated-on-the-surface reasons they give; a lot of people don't want their kids exposed to internet harms, be that extreme material or addictive services and doom-scrolling, and don't have the technical know-how to effect that themselves.
The insistence by so many in tech that there is no honest intent and that there is no way to practically provide age verification in a thoughtful, anonymous way is frustrating.
It's frustrating to see so many people engaged in effective conspiratorial thinking and it's frustrating because there are many good arguments to be had here, but they won't land if the 'anti' side doesn't address the real concerns that real people have about the safety and mental health of their kids.
simoncion 6 hours ago [-]
> The insistence by so many in tech that there is no honest intent...
If there were honest intent, then the regs would be beefing up the "Parental Controls" mechanisms present in every major OS and commanding that there be fines for not respecting those settings. Not only does this mechanism require zero involvement of an unrelated third party, it allows a guardian to protect both a child too ignorant of the dangers of the world to be trusted to competently handle them and an adult whose mind has been so damaged by age and/or disease that they can no longer handle those same dangers.
Instead, the systems that we're getting are ones in which computer users are -when it's not mandatory- very, very strongly encouraged to present photo ID to a third party. While all the US regs I can find currently "only" require adding mechanisms for punching in a birth date, it's all but certain that continued evidence of minors lying about their age will cause those laws to be "upgraded" to require a photo ID.
Nursie 3 hours ago [-]
> If there were honest intent, then the regs would be beefing up the "Parental Controls" mechanisms present in every major OS
Not everyone knows they exist, and there's a huge install base of older and/or cheaper devices that may not be getting updates that could be strengthened like this.
> Not only does this mechanism require zero involvement of an unrelated third party
But what if we do want to regulate the behaviour of those third parties? We know they've been cognisant of the harms and addictive behaviours their stuff promotes (see internal Meta research), and in fact seem to have designed for that. If the controls are only at the consumer side, are we not likely to see an arms race where they continue to try to addict kids around the controls?
You're also assuming a level of technical sophistication on the part of parents, voters and politicians that would necessarily lead them to come to the same conclusions as yourself about solutions. This may simply not be present.
This is what I mean by "good arguments that won't land". We can talk about how solutions should work, whether solutions can possibly work, and even make strong arguments that regulation in this area is wrong in and of itself. Jumping straight to "they're all liars and only want to spy on me" makes the entire thing look like a group of fringe nutters unable to take onboard how people (particularly non-tech people) feel.
simoncion 3 hours ago [-]
> Not everyone knows they exist...
"Oddly", the laws that demand you enter your birthday (and will eventually demand you scan your ID) seem to require OS producers to make it so that users will not be ignorant of these new features. [0] I wonder if it's possible to do the same thing for Parental Controls...?
> ...there's a huge install base of older and/or cheaper devices that may not be getting updates that could be strengthened like this.
They're not going to be getting updated to be compliant with any of the new state (or Federal) user-identification regs, so I don't see what good-faith reason you could have for bringing them up.
> But what if we do want to regulate the behaviour of those third parties?
You use law and regulation? You mention nothing in your subsequent paragraphs that a "Papers, Please!" mechanism will prevent that a "Beefed-up and difficult-to-bypass Parent Controls" mechanism will not.
[0] For example, AB1043 says (among other things)
1798.501. (a) An operating system provider shall do all of the following:
(1) Provide an accessible interface at account setup that requires an account holder to indicate the birth date, age, or both, of the user of that device for the purpose of providing a signal regarding the user’s age bracket to applications available in a covered application store.
Nursie 3 hours ago [-]
> You use law and regulation?
I mean, 'papers please' mechanisms are a type of law and regulation, we're arguing over what sort of law and regulation should be used, no?
In Australia, platforms are being regulated, the regulation says they must not allow under 16s to have accounts. How they achieve this is up to them to a large extent. "Papers-please" then is their doing. It's certainly not the only way things can be done - see anonymous credentials, verifiable credentials and other such schemes that don't involve showing your identification documents to everyone that asks.
> You mention nothing in your subsequent paragraphs that a "Papers, Please!" mechanism will prevent that a "Beefed-up and difficult-to-bypass Parent Controls" mechanism will not.
An arms race to work around the controls, which seems likely to me unless there is some sort of regulation on the service providers.
But either way, look at this! We're discussing how things might work, rather than dismissing things out of hand and impugning each others' motives. Going to the "Papers please" governments and parents in those populations, saying "Look, we understand there is concern and we think there's a better way", or even "We understand the concern but here's why acting on it in any way is a bad idea" is a lot better than "You're all evil and probably stupid".
simoncion 2 hours ago [-]
> I mean, 'papers please' mechanisms are a type of law and regulation...
Yes, they are. I still have no idea how laws of the form "You must honor the signals you get from Beefed-Up Parental Controls and we fine or jail you if you do not" fails to constrain the behavior of US-based businesses. You seem to have an understanding of how it won't, so do let me know what I'm missing?
> An arms race to work around the controls,
Whether the arms race is server-side or client-side is irrelevant. If anything, I'd expect a client-side implementation to be far more robust... if for no other reason than because the private company that is contracted to implement and run a server-side implementation will cut every corner to improve their profit margins.
> In Australia...
Speaking from a civil-liberties perspective, Australia has been a shithole for a long time now. They can very safely be ignored by US parents and US lawmakers.
> "You're all evil and probably stupid".
The people who are pushing for these "Papers Please!" regs are evil. The lawmakers (and parents) who aren't asking "Wait, what about the existing Parental Controls mechanisms built into every major OS?" are stupid and -if that stupidity is willful- also evil. Those are plain facts. One is not obligated to be all niceys to people who are invested in tearing yet another chunk out of the vial organs of civic life.
Nursie 2 hours ago [-]
> "You must honor the signals you get from Beefed-Up Parental Controls and we fine or jail you if you do not"
> If anything, I'd expect a client-side implementation to be far more robust...
You're not really describing a client-side solution, you're describing legislation of something like the old Do Not Track header, which is a server-side solution, and fines for services which don't respect it. In such a situation I would expect 'smart' firms like Meta to start finding just-this-side-of-legal ways to get kids hooked on their services. But I suppose the same is likely to happen with server-side-verified blocks on kids using services, Meta can spin up new services that don't quite meet the definition and try to work around it. I guess this is orthoganal to the method of blocking kids.
> from a civil-liberties perspective Australia has been a shithole for a long time now. They can very safely be ignored by US parents and US lawmakers.
Even though what they are doing is less "Papers please" and more "Services must verify, how it's done is up to you", which seems lower down your evil scale than the US states you're up in arms about?
Interesting take.
But again, this is fine, it's an exchange of ideas. You don't seem to be against age verification in principle, you're acknowledging that people want something done. The article and many commenters here are immediately writing off everything in this area as effectively a distraction from full monitoring of everything everyone does on the net.
So while we may disagree entirely on how to go about effecting any sort of solution, and we may not (honestly I'm not entirely averse to the parental controls idea), you're not dismissing the problem out of hand, and in general I have no quarrel with you or your approach.
simoncion 1 hours ago [-]
> Even though what they are doing is...
I suppose you missed the part where I said
Australia has been a shithole for a long time now.
This "You must present ID to use a computer" shit is relatively new.
> You're not really describing a client-side solution, you're describing legislation of something like the old Do Not Track header, which is a server-side solution...
Mmm. No, there are three systems being described here.
1) "Beefed up Parental Controls", where all service-restriction information is entered and stored client-side and sent server-side as needed.
2) "Age Please!", where a "guardian account" associates the birthdate/year of one or more users to their respective accounts using the client device. This information is entered and stored client-side and is sent server-side as needed.
3) "Papers Please!" -which is what #2 will become-, where a user uses their client device to photograph their government-issued photo ID to be sent to a third-party and processed server-side.
Because we're talking about accessing an Internet-hosted service, your apparent confusion about the need to send some information to the services servers is -itself- confusing.
> You don't seem to be against age verification in principle...
I'm 100% against it. I'm 100% for guardian-controlled content-restriction policies. I'm also completely fine with a "How old is your cutie? What things do you want them to not see or do?" wizard that populates those policies with some defaults that the guardian can fine-tune if they wish to.
> It's not even about being "all niceys" it's about recognising that the concern people have is genuinely held, and addressing it.
An equally important skill is recognizing when those concerns are not genuinely held. Anyone who should know about "Parental Controls" and chooses "Papers Please!" or "Age Please!" is evil. Lawmakers and regulators pushing for this stuff are in this bucket. Anyone who -once introduced to the concept- claims to see no world in which "Parental Controls" can be beefed up and also claims that "Age Please!" or "Papers Please!" is the only viable option is -at minimum- unrecoverably stupid, and is probably also evil.
Nursie 1 hours ago [-]
> I suppose you missed the part where I said
The part that I quoted? That would be quite a feat. Either way I think it's definitely a choice to entirely ignore what a country is doing in this area due to historical reasons, when the country you're interested in making changes to appears to be doing worse.
> Mmm. No, there are three systems being described here.
There are more than three options here. Here are more possibilities (already in use in some places) -
4. Service providers make an informed guess about who might be a kid, based on usage patterns and scanning the pictures they've uploaded.
5. Anonymous credentials systems, as described in the link in my first post that you responded to.
Neither of these is a 'papers please' solution.
> your apparent confusion about the need to send some information to the services servers is -itself- confusing.
So you're also implicitly ignoring solution 6, which a lot of people elsewhere in this thread are arguing for, which is parents using existing parental control systems built into their devices, which work 100% client side?
> I'm 100% for guardian-controlled content-restriction policies.
That's age verification of a sort by the guardian, enforced server-side. So no, you're not against these systems in principle, you're just proposing a solution that you find palatable.
> Anyone who should know about "Parental Controls" and chooses "Papers Please!" or "Age Please!" is evil.
Why? Parental controls at the moment are patchy, poorly understood and certainly don't operate in the way you're proposing they should in future. It's easy to see why people might declare that such schemes are inadequate.
I am finding it very funny that you are determined to put yourself in the category of "People Nursie disagrees with because they dismiss the entire thing as a conspiracy", even while you're not actually doing that, you're arguing in good faith and I applaud it!
simoncion 40 minutes ago [-]
> So you're also implicitly ignoring solution 6, which a lot of people elsewhere in this thread are arguing for, which is parents using existing parental control systems built into their devices, which work 100% client side?
I'm 100% fine with those, but people report that they're "insufficient" for vague reasons. That's why I suggest we beef them up. Also...
> Why? Parental controls at the moment are patchy, poorly understood and certainly don't operate in the way you're proposing they should in future.
you seem to agree with the reports I'm hearing. That's why I suggest beefing them up.
> The part that I quoted? That would be quite a feat.
One that you managed, somehow. Gratz.
> ...they dismiss the entire thing as a conspiracy
Unless you're using the "Two or more people get together to plan something" definition of the word "conspiracy" -which happens to neatly cover planning to go to lunch-, I don't consider this to be a conspiracy. [0]
> There are more than three options here.
I was only discussing three, and I'm sure we can come up with way more than five in total, but sure, let's go.
> 4. Service providers make an informed guess...
That's happening now and has been for a while now. We all see how willing the larger operators are to rely on their guesses rather than relying on the judgment of a third-party. Having said that... when last I checked, 4chan was one of the operators who are doing the noble thing in the face of all this hysteria. [1] It sure is something when 4chan is on the right side of an issue and the big guys aren't.
> 5. Anonymous credentials systems...
They're absolutely not going to be anonymous in practice. As I mentioned earlier:
...the private company that is contracted to implement and run a server-side implementation will cut every corner to improve their profit margins.
> That's age verification of a sort by the guardian...
Absolutely not. Do explain where the restricted account has either its age, documents that contain its user's age, or documents that can be used to look up its user's age entered into it. A helpful hint is to ask yourself how you'd distinguish between the content restrictions set for a precocious eleven-year-old and those set for an adult suffering from both PTSD and advanced dementia who needs to be protected from both scammers and graphic depictions of sex and violence.
[0] Yes, I read ahead to the end of the sentence I quoted. The statement to which this footnote is attached is included for completeness' sake.
The scary part is not "age checks today, secret police tomorrow". It is that once there is a convenient identity-verification layer for normal internet use, it will be very hard to keep it limited to the original purpose... Every future regulator, prosecutor, platform and "think of the children" campaign will have an incentive to expand it
quotemstr 7 hours ago [-]
It doesn't have to be, FWIW. We have all the technology we need to decouple attribution from identity. We can achieve efficient and mathematically perfect unlinkability.
Yet the powerful continue to insist on "papers, please" anonymity-rending personal authentication over anonymous authorization. It's not often that the villains of history so clearly identify themselves.
My bunch is that the people driving this stuff were unaware that age verification could be privacy-preserving and can't exactly back down now.
BenFranklin100 8 hours ago [-]
Calls to mind a quote attributed to Cardinal Richelieu, 16th century Secretary of State for France:
‘If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him”
jimbob45 6 hours ago [-]
What would you say to someone who is afraid that a bad actor will find their kids on Discord/Minecraft/4chan and encourage them to commit suicide or shoot up their school?
tryauuum 6 hours ago [-]
I would tell them to not give their children internet access at all until they think they are ready. Does it sound realistic? I don't know. From technical point of view certainly realistic, a child doesn't have money / devices of his own
m0unta1ntube 5 hours ago [-]
Listen to your children, give them attention, they are your responsibility, don't give them internet access if you find it unsafe
OutOfHere 7 hours ago [-]
We do need a decentralized scalable permissionless platform for speech. For it to remain sustainable, there should be a slight cost in Monero to making each post on it, preloadable in batches.
microgpt 6 hours ago [-]
Have one. Called the internet.
thomastjeffery 8 hours ago [-]
That, and it defines children as perpetrators instead of victims. What right could a citizen ever claim in a world where even children are guilty?
There is a huge difference between protecting children and prosecuting/punishing children. Age verification can only be an implementation of the latter.
jauntywundrkind 8 hours ago [-]
Look at W Social. The governments will team up with anyone, no matter how shady, as long as they promise to try to restrict free, unattributed speech. They'll team up with absolute sharks, as long as those sharks are gonna help sack and battle the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48584497
shevy-java 7 hours ago [-]
Fascism will lose in the long run. Right now the lobbyists
coordinate rather effectively, looking at how many democracies
already succumbed here. Well, we need direct democracy - the
system that we have right now with regard to democracies, is
undermined by corruption.
Nursie 6 hours ago [-]
What makes you think that age verification on the internet wouldn't be wildly popular with the demos?
cindyllm 3 minutes ago [-]
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piokoch 6 hours ago [-]
Yup "protecting kids" has a long, long history of being used as an excuse to restrict citizens rights, yet something like Epstein Island was happening with all the proponents of child protection being happy visitors of the said island.
nephihaha 3 hours ago [-]
Jevon McSkimming, the second most powerful person in the New Zealand police, under Jacinda Ardern, was arrested not long ago for viewing extreme kiddie porn involving animals and torture. He had been doing so on his work computer!
Complaints had been made against the man for years and been thrown out because of who he was, and the material was only found by accident.
This same individual had been yet another one of those arguing for tighter controls on the internet and free speech for the peasants.
Another one of these "one rule for me, another for thee" types.
microgpt 7 hours ago [-]
What are you talking about. They already have automated attribution of speech.
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derektank 8 hours ago [-]
Disliking data centers, illegal immigration, or taxes is not a crime in the United States, nor is posting inconvenient messages about politicians, nor is getting a little too rowdy in a group chat. And none of these things are likely to be made illegal any time soon.
I always find this form of argument in favor of privacy (which is valuable in its own right to be clear) so roundabout. If you’re concerned about the government impinging on your freedom of speech, then why not write an essay arguing for expansive freedom of speech protections? That seems like a much more direct solution to the problem presented in this essay.
I’m not exactly sure how an abuse of power occurring at a public event relates to the question of privacy or freedom of speech. The law did not allow the officer to arrest the man for the content of his speech so he retaliated by enforcing a different law unjustly. This kind of selective enforcement of the law can be a violation of federal law and the man likely has standing to sue.
derektank 7 hours ago [-]
For reference, a similar case of selective enforcement against an outspoken critic of the local government in Texas resulted in the critic receiving a settlement of $500k following an unjust arrest
it's an example of the government silencing people for speech
charcircuit 6 hours ago [-]
No, it's an example of someone being told to leave, not doing so, and then being arrested for trespassing.
microgpt 4 hours ago [-]
For speech. By the government.
nephihaha 3 hours ago [-]
For being five seconds over? Not even minutes.
charcircuit 1 hours ago [-]
He was asked due to his actions he took after he was told to stop. If he had just stopped talking after being told his time was up he would not have been asked to leave.
microgpt 45 minutes ago [-]
Honest question: which part of the First Amendment says you only get three minutes to speak?
7 hours ago [-]
Rendered at 12:02:18 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
(And cause and effect are taught pretty early on in school; not sure you need to learn "systems thinking" to understand nth-order effects.)
What are the nth-order effects that you think are not being considered or weighted accordingly by proponents of this regulation?
That being said, any expectation of thoughtfulness at all makes politics frustrating. Even basic things like why people keep making small random changes when most of these problems and solutions haven't changed in more than 2 millennia. And there is a pretty easy consensus to come to about what works. The repeated failures of authoritarianism to get to a good place are so consistent it is wild that people keep trying it.
In this day and age, probably with a relatively tiny investment into public access points, we could very reasonably have a technically functional direct democracy. The legislative cycle is already authenticated so there's no need to solve "authenticated anonymous vote" problem, European countries already have functional eIDAS systems to back the authentication part and the legislative systems are already to some degree digitized.
On one hand, the problem "what if someone sells their vote" is already present and unsolved, in the shape of lobbying. What's interesting, though, that we have built entire systems to shape public opinion and entrenched them into our daily lives, which are used by corporations and politicians alike.
This begs a question: is there such a thing as unbiased public opinion without authenticated internet access?
inb4: direct democracy does not mean parliamentary systems could be abolished altogether, central spaces for debate would still help solve discussion exchange problems
As has been mentioned elsewhere on the thread - the real issue is often there are complex 2nd and third order effects, often there are devils in the details.
I'm not saying people are not capable of consuming it, I'm saying people don't have the bandwidth.
Direct democracy is best when it's used for very specific proposals with lots of time for debate - not every decision.
If you use it for every decision, time poor citizens will end up at the mercy of professional story tellers.
I don't think it's just a bandwidth problem.
However average people are actually pretty good at making the right moral, common sense calls, if not the technical legal detail. I suspect that's in part because they are not living in the Westminister ( or whatever your seat of power is ) bubble.
So any system needs to blend that common sense, with specific expertise. In theory that's what a representative democracy does - however one of the failings currently is the party system ( note designed, in part, to overcome the bandwidth problem - people grouping together to give a single consistent message rather than 100's of independent ones ), where capture of the party by a few people has become too easy and some options that the majority of people want never being offered at the voting time.
This results in an increasingly angry and volatile electorate.
Some of the examples I've seen it tried - I've seen the people setting it up trying to fix the outcome by carefully choosing the question, then providing expert advice on options scoped by the question.
Framing of the question is a powerful tool to promote the outcome you want, and avoiding ever asking certain questions is another.
Not saying it doesn't have it's place - you just need to be careful that the process isn't used to try and legitimise what would otherwise be unpopular policies via concentrated persuasion on a small number of people.
I think there is more to it. A large part of democracy is delegating decision making to people with time and expertise to investigate issues more thoroughly than most individuals can or want to.
I have some broad opinions about the environment etc. but I am by no means an expert in the details, so I am happy to delegate day to day decision making to someone with more expertise who's opinions broadly align with my own.
I'd agree that referendums do make more sense on "issues of conscience" though, like whether to have a death penalty, voting reform etc.
REPLACE FED CHAIR WITH DOVE OR HAWK?
BUILD NEW STRATEGIC BOMBERS?
START A WAR WITH IRAN?
VOTE NOW!
Imagine the chaos. Imagine all the ads.
Direct democracy is cool, but also impractical. I do not want to vote on every counties appropriations for road maintenance. So what's a level of direct democracy that's "good enough"? How do we make sure we're directly voting in things relevant to our lives? What if "relevant to our lives" is unrelated to our geographic location and is very interests based? If anyone can vote for anything, but most folks don't ever vote for most things, how do you prevent brigading of votes via coordination by groups who see that their group alone can swing what would be a small local vote whatever way they want by virtue of sheer numbers? How do you prevent trolls from going through every vote and just voting no on every "community center paper-and-ink budget" across the entire country?
There are so many questions I have about direct democracy systems! Do you have more information?
This particular question has an extremely simple answer - derived from the decades of practical development of consensus based systems in democratic spaces (art spaces, leftist political groups etc). You vote / participate in the consensus decision making of the issues that are most important to you. It's that simple. Every issue is democratically decided, and you just 'tune in' to the ones that matter to you.
In terms of brigading / trolling are harder. In consensus institutions they're usually dealt with by limiting the amount of blocking (forcing tabling of an issue) and ensuring that voting / consensus participation is limited to those who are actively involved in the community. This is obviously far more complex on a societal level.
Overall this requires a bigger investment of time, but you're in no way required to care about everything. Over time though, the group / institution / society, is forced to grow up. Or at least grow out of the learned helplessness that dominates contemporary representative democracy.
The best way to do this is through a combination of subsidiarity and constitutional rights.
You have a central government but its primary purpose is to set out and uphold fundamental rights. It essentially sets out what the local governments can't do, so you can't have ex post facto laws, censor speech, detain people without trial, try to enforce local laws on actions performed in remote jurisdictions, etc.
In particular, the central government should not be in the business of regulating private conduct. Only the local governments do that.
Then you don't have to be worried about appropriations for road maintenance in some other county because you don't live there. Whereas the appropriations in your county are coming out of your pocket, and aren't such a far away thing that your vote is being diluted into irrelevance, so then maybe you want to be paying some attention to that.
Doesn't really matter except philosophically. There's something close enough to unbiased public opinion when there are no government propaganda campaings, censorship, press owned by conglomerates, and corporate messaging.
It's very hard to have truly independent media.
But a lot of countries are somewhere on the "direct" vs "representative" spectrum. The US actually abnormally lacking in direct mechanisms, for example. See
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referendums_by_country
only on a federal level. states like california or texas are more direct than a lot of western europe in some ways. like the fact that ballot props are binding law or sheriffs and state attorneys are elected.
I'm one of those everyones, and I don't agree.
Except if you mean local initiatives that don't concern 100M people, but e.g. some regional municipality. Of course then just the locals can vote, be they 100K or 1M.
I guess I could argue that putting a stop sign at a particular intersection in rural Kansas could concern me, even though I don't live in Kansas, but I think very few people would make that argument in good faith.
The median size looks to be around 200,000 people, so maybe start by dividing the US population into cantons of around that size and doing most of the rulemaking at that level.
Very few people realize that there is option to not use government cohersion as a solution to everything.
I know this is unpopular opinion. The system is designed for this to be unpopular opinion.
But the problem is not the democracy, but the level of power we give to the government. If the only power of government would be to pick flag colors and national anthem, no one would care about it.
No one cares about UK having a king, because it doesn't change a thing.
That's a quite fatal view. I'm not going to defend the shortcomings of democracy as a system or the issues all real implementations have. But democracy has a feature that is unique about it: as long as it actually is a democracy, as soon as things go a way that the people don't like, they can do something about it and change course. For better or worse, but they can. That's the main point of democracy.
Besides, having votes or electionsor is really just a minor detail of the concept of democracy. There is much more to it, like a free conversation in society, strong independent education, journalism, justice, protection of minorities, etc. The will of the people doesn't fall from the sky or is set in stone. It's a permanent conversation which needs all the other mechanisms. If all that happens is a vote every few years, that's not at all indicative of a democracy. Neither is democracy synonymous with majority rule.
> Very few people realize that there is option to not use government cohersion as a solution to everything.
What is "cohersion"? There are "cohesion" and "coercion". Assuming the latter, what does this have to do with democracy? An autocracy or dictarship or whatever non-democratic system you can imagine also likely has a government, and their coercion mechanisms tend to be worse than in democracies. In a democracy you have an independent judical system that you can use against government overreach.
Which is the position the Monarchy absolutely wants you to have, and they definitely don't want you to know that they have veto power over all laws, and regularly intervene and get laws modified so that they're not included in scope.
Meanwhile they just gave themselves a massive pay rise, at a time when government is cutting public spending in all areas.
One notable example of their privilege was when Andrew George MP dared to ask a question in parliament about the Duchy of Cornwall, only to be told he wasn't allowed to. (The Duchy of Cornwall is a kind of slush fund for the heir to throne. Charles had it before he became king. It has tax breaks, and also the ability to seize property and mine on people's land.)
The BBC promotes the monarchy heavily as it is under royal charter.
There were significant protests at the Queen's funeral cortege and the current king's coronation. The state clamped down hard, in one case arresting someone for holding up a blank bit of paper.
Every law should have an automatic sunset period of 1-10 years that requires it to pass the entire legislative process again, or at least both full chambers + signing.
Further down the line technical solutions that are private will become illegal and in general not being pro survailance will get you in trouble
The solution to privacy problem is not to shout while closing your ears but to make it clear that you see their side, how new tech create new problems, and help solve it in least privacy invasive ways.
Otherwise you will always be seen as somebody who has shady agenda. It's just reality. Ordinary people do not care about e2ee. Gotta read the room.
But chat control and age verification are different things.
It's a matter of phrasing things. Moxie had this illustrative take: If your chat is not e2ee, it'a a group chat. It's you, your mom, every secret service in the world and some ISP employees as well. If we could clarify to our social circles and broader society that every non-e2ee chat can be browsed by some overpaid freckled 20-something borded out of his mind at a FAANG or an ISP then the viewpoint could change.
Maybe one of the most helpful parallels is with mail. I think US and other countries have strict laws about mail communication privacy. Someone can in theory open your mail but it's strictly regulated and not done in a total way.
Also I do think talking about future malicious government prosecuting people based on what was collected previously is actually a good one. But just talking about privacy may be a little too vague.
Although they appear to be different different things at first sight, they share the same agenda and objective, mass surveillance and identification of the citizens. Once the door is opened, it can be expected that things will not end there; Politicians and their patrons will exploit this data under "committees" (and of course be excluded from such surveillance as an aggravating factor).
Nowadays it's needed a court order to access legally to the privacy of citizens, and this must be done by the Police or the Interpol, nevertheless someones want to break this.
If they were really worried by the citizens security, they would increase the number of police and judges working in this digital divisions, among other things related to this.
The risk is there but it is not a given. The debate is not new, it's been going on for decades. It's a permanent struggle.
Cancer surgery is an extremely important decision, directly affecting many people's lives.
What happened with Brexit was a analogous a bunch of salesmen on TV saying "that mysterious ache you have, don't listen to doctors who say it's fine, call our surgical team today! It's cancer! We can fix this quickly and you'll be back to your old self within a week!" for two decades, then the country agreeing, going to surgery, and waking up to find they'd had half their liver removed, the post-surgical biopsy results said it was fine and not cancerous at all, it took 6 months to recover and they could never drink alcohol again. And the ache was still there.
If it had been an honest "we know it will cost X, we are willing to spend this because otherwise what is the point of money", that would have been totally fair.
Instead, problems that weren't caused by the EU were blamed on it for decades, while the benefits of membership were treated as the natural state of the world to the extent that talk of losing them was equated with "being punished".
Not all referenda that might win a "yes" vote are sensible to propose.
> The referendum was originally conceived by David Cameron as a means to defeat the anti-EU faction within his own party by having it fail.
After that, another issue is that the leave campaign was heavily based on lies and misleading the British voters.
Couple that with a extreme form of policy lock-in / hysteresis: you need just to form a small margin in a majority at a single point of time. After that point of time, the popular opinion doesn't matter anymore because getting back to EU isn't as easy as leaving. So the misinformation campaign need to work just once. By the time voters realize what happened, it's too late.
This situation is a critical failure of democracy. Not just direct democracy, representative democracy can't work in a post-truth world either.
This is very different to age sniffing here. Age sniffing is not being queried via public votum - lobbyists push it through without any resistance. It's amazing how this works.
This whole argument is why we do not have more direct democracy. The people in power and people who benefit from the status quo do not want the hoi polloi taking the "wrong" decisions. We might end up nationalising things or taxing big business effectively or all sorts of terrible things. Better to just give people the illusion of choice by letting them choose between two "neo-liberal" parties.
I'm not sure about that at all. All my normies friends have no problem immediately submitting their documents to any KYC service that requests it. And talking about chat control they happily parrot the propaganda points, which is something very normal given that they have no insight as we do.
So unfortunately I believe that the laymen are all in favor of chat control.
From "Muh freeze peach" to the actual government requested censorship during COVID everyone is rushing to get a new shiny stick they can use to beat their political opponents with.
I don't believe this. I believe us more tech oriented people live in a dangerous bubble that reassures us that obviously people are against it. But that's very likely not true.
> the evidence is that people already pretty firmly against things like chat control and the will to push it through tends to come from the political circles more than popular belief it is a good idea.
This is quite the statement. What evidence do you have that of this? Here in the UK, the equivalent bills are pretty widely supported across he board.
> I expect that if the measure itself went to a general vote, the majority would be against it once they have to deal with a specific proposal
This is likely true of pretty much anything, though. Imagine suggesting that people collectively fund a national road network by paying 20% of their income to the government (or whatever number your state/country/municipality chooses). All of a sudden it’s a terrible idea!
So the argument will go to “think of the children” which is a guise for more control and then pretty soon we are living in the dystopian future of 1984 or the UK where the film V for Vendetta took place.
This same kind of thinking gets idiots like Trump elected because people don’t have any sense of the commons and become single issue voters (sic). “Oh just reduce my taxes on my carried interest… reduce my taxes… I’m a xenophobe I hate immigrants let’s not do anything systematic let’s just hard close the border or the world is flat America only exists we don’t need allies or trading partners (JD Vance) … and so on”
Yet I don't think age verification will work with national IDs for that matter. I generally use social media sites that won't implement it.
But yes, the normal insta/tiktok user will be affected and not think too much about it. Others will have true freedom of speech.
Which social media sites won't implement it?
Admittedly it's a long time since I was in school, but when I was there the notion of teaching the benefits of physical activity was limited to being told to run about for some 'sport', and absolutely nothing about why that's a good idea. Everyone was expected to do the same thing with no consideration for ability, disability, or motivation. Kids were punished with detentions for refusing to endure painful exercise that they couldn't do as well as their more capable peers.
The very obvious second order effect of poor physical education is fat unmotivated adults who don't exercise. Maybe educators need some systems thinking training too.
My particular favorite thing to rant about is how, on the first day, I was held in detention for the entire day and made to skip the introduction to my classes because I unknowingly wore the wrong shade of blue for the dress code. Like the middle school in the same district, the dress code required a white, red, or blue polo (FUCK YEAH AMERICA!!!!), but the shade of blue from the middle school uniforms was not allowed, something I was never aware of but instead got arbitrarily punished for along with dozens of others, with my parent being made to buy a new set of uniform shirts after school.
It is no wonder that the US is in a state of decline given how horrid the schooling is. I can't imagine a worse environment for stifling intellectual curiosity than the one I was in.
Turns out I just really really hate running.
Absolutely hate running!
Though I suppose that may have something to do with households in the early days having at most one internet connected device even if they were well off, so society could get away with blaming parents for not monitoring kids' use.
One could present the case in favor of Internet age verification to the nth-order effects, while downplaying the effects in the case against.
So, in addition to presenting the cases with foreseeable effects, we need ways to compare the impact of worst-case scenarios in the two cases, and make a decision or compromise based on that.
It's bereft to suggest that we wouldn't nominally have those in the digital world.
And, people are concerned about nth order effects, it's a huge point of debate.
Yes - there is a huge slippery slope argument to be made, but it's an argument ... to be made. There are all sorts of ways of doing this.
A public square does not have trolls and bots from across the globe teleporting in and out. A public square does not amplify the most divisive comments and drown out your friends's holiday photos because the former makes the ad space more profitable.
The public square has never been properly anonymous. If you start saying things which contravene laws or the rights of others, the police have been able to capture you and unmask your identity, if concealed.
Who is suggesting people 'show their papers' to go into a public square?
Literally nobody.
It really demonstrates how bad the analogy is - so much so that it's not even analogy.
The 'social controls' on the 'public square' are limited by a few laws (aka directed violence) but apart from that you can say as you like, kids can as well - it's where parents can be parents.
And - don't have problem with kids in the public square.
We have a very real problem with kids on social media, verifiable, scientific.
Kids are depressed, distracted, they bully each other, they're creeped on, and they're not yet in the business having serious discussions about 'Mein Kampf' - they're kids.
Everything in kids lives is introduced in an 'age appropriate' fashion - literally everything.
Given the toxicity of social media, it's a 'primary concern' for one of those gated things.
This is not even an argument - the only argument is 'the slippery slope'.
If the point were to improve on the mental health of kids there are countless underfunded public programs. Especially in the US, social support programs like food, healthcare basic and mental, actual physical public spaces for kids, arts in curriculum, etc.
Conversely, I don’t agree with the way some other countries are going about it. Especially the UK with the abysmal way they have physically policed online speech by adults. Incredibly sad to see police prioritise non-violent “speech crimes” because they’re too scaredy-cat to tackle actual violent crime.
There is a reasonable answer to be found, if we're willing to be inventive. It shouldn’t be beyond the imagination of cryptography experts to design a system where only governments can issue an age identification certificate, which individuals can use to generate verifiable proof of age tokens. But where the tokens can’t be used by the government to identify the individual.
The government shouldn't infringe on my right to bear arms, mass shooting is a mental health issue anyways, oh but we can't really fund mental health support because my tax shouldn't go towards helping those who put themselves in that situation. Que the same argument for privacy on the internet.
You can't have your cake and eat it too. If you can't trust the government, then work towards healing it, restructuring it, overhauling it. Subverting the government is such antisocial behaviour, very criminal like.
I actually like the traditional public square model: you have anonymity most of the time, but it’s not some absolute shield you can abuse to be an obnoxious prick. The police can intervene, but the intervention happens in the public square too.
Publishing a book anonymously in the public square still means someone has to physically manufacture it, distribute it, convince you to read it, and pay for all of this. All these steps are subject to interdiction by the police.
Your local 'town square' has 'some rules'.
Parents are entirely able to overcome any of this if they so choose - including feeding their kids alcohol, guns etc. - and so the freedom does materially exist.
Social Media isn't a place for free expression - it's mostly toxic - like exposing your children to the most vile, inauthentic people.
The more genteel places, frankly, won't have much in the way of age restrictions.
Entire nations are banning social media for kids because it's just not healthy - the teachers want it, the parents want it, the data seems to support it.
I think you're right to be (very concerned) but this is a necessary discussion. As a teacher.
It literally doesn't (at least not if I don't intend to borrow a book and take it home; if I stay there and read, I can do so without any ID. I only need ID to get a library card, and I don't need that to enter and read a book).
The point is that 'even the local library' enacts rules and social conventions - not that they're exhaustively and acutely enforced in all corners.
No 4chan section in the library?
You might wonder why it doesn't have vast array of avant guard adult content, porn or art with really aggressive themes and people calling each other the n-word?
In society we have 'age related' conventions all over the place ... including your Library.
This is the absolute worst of HN, where people dissolve into Reddit-like discussions of bad meatphors and totally out of context hair splitting.
I just can't believe anyone here has any relationship with the reality of children, teaching or parenting whatsoever. It's the same argument made by the 'drugs should be legal and accessible' crowd - completely oblivious to the instantaneous massive health epidemic we'd have with opioids and fentanyl, or the 'anti vaxer' crowd - narrow ideological arguments about expression disconnected from any kind of reality or nuance.
There's a variation of social media that will be fine for the kids, they can be exposed to more into their late teens. Parents that want to opt out, will de facto be allowed to - and there is always a slippery slope with every law.
I can be 9 years old and go to the library and read any book they have without showing ID. Whatever your point is, it escapes me.
> The point is that 'even the local library' enacts rules and social conventions - not that they're exhaustively and acutely enforced in all corners.
Then let us do the same thing on the internet. Age verification is not that (at least in the forms being pushed).
> No 4chan section in the library?
No, but there are 4chan-style books I can read there. Anything that isn't outright illegal (Anarchist's cookbook) is pretty darn available there.
> You might wonder why it doesn't have vast array of avant guard adult content, porn or art with really aggressive themes and people calling each other the n-word?
That'd be because it does have books like that. Your point continues to escape me. Maybe my library is really pushing whatever limits.
> I just can't believe anyone here has any relationship with the reality of children, teaching or parenting whatsoever
I've literally been an assistant teacher for about a year. You probably won't believe me though.
> It's the same argument made by the 'drugs should be legal and accessible' crowd
Who I agree with! Funny how that works!
> completely oblivious to the instantaneous massive health epidemic we'd have with opioids and fentanyl
Imagine a world where we can have that regulated, so people know what they're taking, and can see a doctor to get help without getting the police on their back, rather than the unregulated shitshow we have now.
> or the 'anti vaxer' crowd - narrow ideological arguments about expression disconnected from any kind of reality or nuance.
This comparison escapes me too. Anti-vax started with (or at least got a massive growth boost by) Andrew Wakefield, whose paper was based on science so bad and whose research was so heinous he's no longer a doctor. If the 'drugs should be legal and accessible' stance is based on science that bad, I'd love to see it.
So you prefer the internet be censored to be as civil as the library?
'Age appropriate' content is the easiest and most obvious way to do this, particularly because of the effects of social media on young minds.
---
"No, but there are 4chan-style books I can read there." (at the library)
Nonsense.
This is 4Chan [1] , and your library does not contain stuff like this.
---
"that'd be because it does have books like that."
Again - no - your library contains books in 'avant gard' art that you think is 'avant gard', but it's in the civil sense.
Your library does not contain books or films showing 'rape voyeurism'.
---
"Imagine a world where we can have that regulated, so people know what they're taking,"
They do! It's right on the bottle! In exact quantities and 'high quality ingredients'!
It's made by PURDUE PHARMA, dispensed by doctors, and has caused a vicious national epidemic affecting millions of lives - and is the leading cause of death for ages 18-45 !!
It's truly the litmus test of 'common sense' vs. 'naive ideology'
The 'starting point' for 'harm reduction' is a reasonable reaction to ugly, ham fisted authoritarian 'throw them all in jail' traditional approaches - especially those milder things like 'marijuana' etc.
But in the end 'Harm Reduction' is actually a 'Radical Religious Progressive Cult of Ideology' rooted in the belief that 'Policing' and 'Patriarchy' the the 'Justice System' are the source of all harms, completely oblivious to basic human behaviour, mixed in with a bunch of Libertarian nonsense.
It's not unreasonable to posit that in 'some cases' an addict can have 'controlled access' to a substance 'without judgment' to help them stabilize, and find a path off of heroin on etc.
This is the 'polite' argument, but it's completely effete.
In reality that those cases are surprisingly rare, clinical, and extremely expensive to administer and control.
Reality is 'the alley full of zombies'.
Drugs kill substantially more people than guns - in Canada guns kill about 300 vs 7000 overdose deaths / year.
That's ballpark 40K-80K non-lethal overdoses per year. Every human who has had an 'overdose' is in a very distressed state - their lives may never recover. Each of them has family members who are in distress.
The 'world you are imagining' (where Fentanyl is available over the counter in 'whatever dose') is 5-10% of of the population hospitalized for opioid related problems within 6 months, and a collapse of the medical and law enforcement systems, not to mention all of the other knock on effects aka huge spike in small crime, loss of workforce, taxation, child welfare problems etc..
Singapore, which takes a very aggressive and authoritarian 'zero tolerance' approach has less than 1% of the deaths.
Less than 1%.
99% percent of those dying of overdose, ostensibly are dying because we refuse to actually take action.
And - because they have such a dramatically lower rate of addiction they can afford full rehab for the remaining actual addicts - this is the most damning evidence against the 'harm reduction' approach: it engenders so many addicts that even as 'rich nations' , we can't afford to help, whereas if we could 'contain the problem', we could afford to focus more on actual addicts.
The 'world you need to imagine' is one where we actually are able to restrict fentanyl, definitely restrict doctors from handing out entire bottles, and are able to afford actual rehab for those how need it.
Addiction is a social disease: it's a learned behaviour transmitted from one person to another. The most dangerous thing to society, is not a 'guy with a gun' - it's a fentanyl addict who will teach or induce someone around them into 'walking death'. That form of 'transmission' is actually more dangerous than COVID.
We're not going to expose our kids to free drugs, or guns, or porn, or vodka, and neither will our kids not use Social Media until they're old enough to be properly socialized to ingest and understand the impact of it.
Then they grow to be adults and make their own decisions, watch porn ... drink vodka ... just not fentanyl. That's it.
---
(Warning, this is a 4-chan like to crude content - only to make a point about what 4chan is)
[1] https://boards.4chan.org/soc/thread/35155514/kik-dick-pic-th...
Given that I can find books that aren't civil there, sure.
> This is 4Chan [1] , and your library does not contain stuff like this.
Finding dick pics at my local library isn't hard, if you know where to look. Ditto 4chan.
> Your library does not contain books or films showing 'rape voyeurism'.
That'd be because it's illegal. Hence my comment about that.
> It's made by PURDUE PHARMA, dispensed by doctors, and has caused a vicious national epidemic affecting millions of lives - and is the leading cause of death for ages 18-45 !!
I'm glad I don't live in the US, where doctors are lobbied (this doesn't seem like the right word, but you get the idea) to push opiates or whatever other drugs on patients, only to then get away with it. Preventing things like that is also included in 'a world where we can have that regulated'. For instance:
> The 'world you need to imagine' is one where we actually are able to restrict fentanyl, definitely restrict doctors from handing out entire bottles, and are able to afford actual rehab for those how need it.
I agree we should restrict doctors from pushing opioids! And rehab should be state sponsored! That too is harm reduction.
> Singapore, which takes a very aggressive and authoritarian 'zero tolerance' approach has less than 1% of the deaths.
Ah, yes, sterile Singapore. I guess 30 years in prison is better than dying.
I'll refrain from commenting on the rest of your post. Have a good day. I know I won't.
--> Your local library fought for your right to read literature of some kind.
---> They did not fight for your right to gang up on others and call them the n-word, to spread lies and slander about people, to harass children and expose them to creeps and pedophiles, to inundate children with hyper-targeted advertising, or 'Andrew Tate 'how to beat women' seminars'.
Nobody is pushing for a ban on social media so that the kids will be stopped from reading 'Judy Bloom' stories about a girl's 'first period'.
It's disingenuous to suggest that this has anything to do with the causes your librarians stand for.
Literally the opposite - your librarians are creating essentially 'safe spaces' for kids so they can read and be civil.
| They did not fight for your right to gang up on others and call them the n-word, to spread lies and slander about people, to harass children and expose them to creeps and pedophiles, to inundate children with hyper-targeted advertising, or 'Andrew Tate 'how to beat women' seminars'.
I think existing laws should be engaged to address pedophiles and incitement of violence in public spaces and social media - no new legislation is really needed. Barring potential victims from a place instead of prosecuting the noxious behavior from the public place seems like an odd approach indeed.
As for libraries - libraries are curated spaces of freedom that are obviously under assault by right wing parties to ban books that support cultural and personal acceptance for other societies as well as out groups like lgbt information, and even basic women's health information. The problem for authoritarians is libraries are too free - not that they are "curated".
You are right about the public square. That is pretty much what governments want to enforce. To silence everyone not in line, like in medieval towns.
Twitter (X) was never the public square, and now it's little more than a playground for propagandists. The rest of us do well to ignore it, and it seems that even the 'legacy' media are starting to realise the days of breathlessly reporting on tweet-storms weren't great for anyone.
The problem is the lack of thinking about the solution and just handwaving “age verification” as a political posture, which is why we end up with half-baked systems.
You're framing this as some desirable thing that could be good except that a bad implementation erodes privacy. That's wrong at every step. These bills originate from big tech such as Meta that literally profit from collecting as much personal info from you as possible. https://old.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/1rsn1tm/it_a...
But even beyond their tainted origins, you can't implement your way out of something badly formed in the first place. You handwave "zero knowledge" but that doesn't do for your privacy what you're hoping it will. That id card will still have a serial number and CCTV of you purchasing it and you will de facto end up trusting some government binary blob to implement this cryptography correctly without backdoors. Snowden was a decade ago. This will have a backdoor. This will be used for surveillance, tomorrow even if by some miracle not today.
And finally, this makes the internet worse. There will be a section of people who are, for one reason or another, not able to pass this bar. Much of the goodness of the internet comes from being able to interact with anyone on it.
Also age verification is still a problem in itself. Given your idea of a physical card, kids will find a way to use the card of their parents. Even if the card couldn't be misused by others - you give platforms the knowledge of whom is a minor, which means they can be targeted better.
All kinds of tools and software would need to be locked down or criminalized. Otherwise, some smart kid is guaranteed to get around the restriction and give that method to others, and if it's at school on a USB stick.
This is just an argument against any regulation whatsoever. Yes, some people will find ways to do illegal stuff, but that doesn't mean forbidding stuff is useless. For instance gangs members always find a way to get access to weapons even in countries where firearms is regulated, but there are still pretty much zero mass slaughter in schools in these countries.
> To make age verification useful for protecting kids, you'd need to lock down every software on every operating system and put it under tight government control.
No! This should never be implemented at the software or OS level in the first place. You should be handed a chip card that you can use for that purpose, like how the bank rent you a credit card. Any other implementation is a bad one, and should be fought.
But by fighting the very idea of age verification instead, an idea that pretty much nobody else in the society has issues with when it comes to voting rights, driving rights, or alcohol consumption, you are just favoring these poor implementations by moving the debate on a ground you can't win.
> Otherwise, some smart kid is guaranteed to get around the restriction and give that method to others,
You should really read that “The optimal amount of fraud is non zero” blog post I linked above.
You don't need government ID to talk to people and share info. You don't need government ID to take a dump.
Also the criticism of the article is just ignored while it is a very likely development and lack of imagination isn't an excuse.
Even today government in the EU are already implementing mass surveillance, even by third parties.
Verification wasn't needed in the past, it won't be needed in the future.
Requiring an internet ID is the the opinion of a marginalised minority that has difficulties with technology. Aside from those that are advertisers of course.
Second, if you hand over a chip card, you still need to lock down and tightly control every executable on every machine. How else would you guarantee that kids cannot access content the government deems unsuitable for them?
Third, I still haven't seen a coherent argument why parents shouldn't be in charge of what content their children are allowed to consume. I'm not at all against governments providing free parental control software, for example, or voluntary industry standards similar to the movie ratings.
Finally, "protecting the children" is obviously a pretense. The sole purpose of the push for this is for governments to get the foot in the door of operating systems they currently can't control well. It's the starting point for a surveillance infrastructure: age verification -> digital ID verification -> tracking who said what and handing the data over to intelligence and law enforcement.
Businesses are always going to favor the cheapest options, but that's why regulation exist.
> Second, if you hand over a chip card, you still need to lock down and tightly control every executable on every machine. How else would you guarantee that kids cannot access content the government deems unsuitable for them?
You don't need to guarantee that. It's like saying you can't have an alcohol consumption ban on teenagers without spying on them all the time. It's technically true but it doesn't matter: having teenagers consume way less booze due to the rules than they would without it, and that's fine for most people, societies don't need to enforce an absolute 100% ban of things for bans to deliver the expected outcome.
> Third, I still haven't seen a coherent argument why parents shouldn't be in charge of what content their children are allowed to consume.
It's much less about what their children are allowed to consume, but what are businesses allowed to sell to their children. It's exactly like alcohol restrictions: the government don't raid houses to check if parents are letting child drink whine and beer at home, but it aggressively enforces that bars don't sell booze to teenagers.
> Finally, "protecting the children" is obviously a pretense.
Not from the electors. Most people are favorable to these things, and that's why these laws are voted. Obviously intelligence agencies are always trying to get access to more data whenever they can, but that's not the reason why these laws are voted, and the representatives routinely could vote for a version of that which doesn't serve any intelligence purpose.
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
> Given your idea of a physical card, kids will find a way to use the card of their parents.
Sure there are kids who have access to their parents credit card with the PIN, but how frequent is that? In every system, fraud will exist, but that doesn't mean the system is worthless. “The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero”: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...
This is not an argument, it's just a stupid quip. And I would sooner suggest that you "never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by malice". Humans are overwhelmingly selfish and more than willing to harm others to serve themselves.
The traditional quip works well on small-scale stuff, but if there's loads of money or power to be gained, malice and greed tends to be fairly prevalent.
In person that falls to a human being, and it's an easy and intuitive task that takes seconds.
On the internet this involves some kind of video recording being sent to some agency somewhere being paid a fee, who may later be asked to prove the efficacy of their service. This agency needs a digital copy of the photo from your ID for matching purposes. They'll be tempted to store this for auditing purposes... they'll also be tempted to store correlation IDs etc if the architecture allows.
The issue is trust. You just can't trust these first and third parties not to collaborate for commercial gain or at government demand or request.
And ultimately you're still exchanging verification at registration for a shareable credentials: I could use my ID to sign up to pornhub premium and then sell the username and password to a 16 year old if I wished, just like those buying alcohol can go and give it to the underage. A black market for digital credentials is even easier to establish than material goods
That's why I'm talking about an “Id card” using Zero-knowledge proofs in a cryptographic chip, not using a paper ID with your picture on top…
You still need to send a digital image from the id, signed by an authority, saying "this person is 18"
You then still need a trusted ID service or algorithm to capture an image of the user _at the time of use_ to compare that to.
Just having access to your digital ID credentials proves nothing
The zero knowledge proof only helps prevent tracking between the ID service and the website you're logging into. This is valuable but requires standardisation and client side support, which doesn't exist.
All the time the client side is implemented by JavaScript served from the server side you're just trusting these parties to behave and not snoop
> You then still need a trusted ID service or algorithm to capture an image of the user _at the time of use_ to compare that to.
> Just having access to your digital ID credentials proves nothing
What's next? Your US legal status as determined by your ethnicity? Scan your face to prove you're white? Yeah, that sounds absolutely ridiculous but so did the age verification with KYC just a few years ago.
We allow bars and car companies to verify age before conducting business. Does that in itself lead to racial discrimination? I think not.
But saying “we must abandon the idea of age verification in bar” is never going to work in any democratic setting.
Voters genuinely want to protect the children, without second thoughts.
But instead of inserting controls around email addresses (as with paid services) or devices (as with contraband), the requirement is pushed to the application layer. It really makes no sense from a technical POV.
Unless a tiny chance exists that some system in the middle is not secure. Then you have the problem of those who orient their acceptance to the "oh well" shrug, and then systemic faults get downplayed by default. (Edit: I re-read and notice 'half-baked systems': seemingly, we agree.)
> as a political posture
Which is the core problem of masses accepting pseudo-heartly and not-brainy unacceptable figures. And again, systemic faults incarnated as administrations get downplayed by default.
Truth be told the worst kind of content is nominally child friendly - just incredibly addictive and overstimulating. We're all so preoccupied with preventing our children from looking at gore or porn or even meeting predators online that we forget that those who stand to make money on addictive content will pull every lever necessary.
In large part that's because, if they'd done so, the kids would've been socially isolated from their peers, at least the most normal ones with the most normal parents, which are the kinds of friends most other normal parents want their kids to have.
It's a collective action problem, except instead of "I can be better off if I ignore what I know is best for society", it's "if I ignore what I know is best for my kids psychologically, they will still have friends, and social media brainrot is a lesser evil than socially isolating my kid from all the normal kids at school."
And also, giving kids social media interaction devices is a convenient form of babysitting. It reduces up-front effort of parenting.
It causes a situation where because of the potential backlash, even if they are right, few people will come to the defense for fear of being ostracized as well.
Does this not imply we also wouldn't get the internet because people would have considered the damage it would also cause?
Age verification is de facto identity verification. Eff says it well:
> But no matter the method, every system demands users hand over sensitive and immutable personal information that links their offline identity to their online activity. https://www.eff.org/issues/age-verification
Tying every action taken online to the user's real identity will have a deep and catastrophic chilling effect, destroying those very places that are creating our culture.
Dude, more that 2 thirds of black kids can barely read [1]
[1] https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading/nation/groups/?gra...
> [..] > male and female students;
So reading scores were lower for everyone? Why single out groups?
> There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.
They have to keep the population blind to any kind of systemic thinking to rob them blind.
What about climate change and the current mass extinction?
But why would we do that?
If we taught people how to think, they wouldn't sit their toddlers down in front an iPad for 8+ hours a day to entertain (read: keep them occupied and quiet) them with YouTube videos, sign them up for a Facebook account before they could wipe their own butts, etc.
The sad irony of this age verification thing is that if we had a decent society and parents with common sense, age verification wouldn't even be a topic.
Uh dumb law I don't like. Cause people dumb. If people not dumb, no dumb law. Uhh I am very smart. "Systems thinking" oh fucking hell stfu
In all these operations, anonymity is what drives it.
I was born and raised in the anonymous internet, and tasted its freedoms. I oppose censorship. But, at this point, I have come to wonder it it would be best to always have your real-life personality attached to all you do. At least to any action that feeds an algorithm or creates something someone else can see.
It is the nature of the internet that you could never achieve absolute censorship -- and maybe anonymity should belong to the hackers and tinkers with the will and drive to hunt and craft for it.
I do not like holding this opinion, because it feels as though it is on the similar boat as that of those who 'pull up the ladder after themselves'. Increasingly, I see it as pulling shut the trapdoors to hell.
P.S. This goes without saying -- it's also the only was to defend against "ai" bots.
I also had similar thoughts to you, but seeing the election results of the previous decade in the US makes me question the premise.
Device attestation is another - making sure you're using an unmodified government approved operating system and apps linked to your ID.
Little by little, everything I hold dear is getting destroyed. Computers of our own, that we control, that we can freely hack on. Everything the word "hacker" stands for. How I wish I could turn back the clock...
This goes way beyond any notion of a "hacker tweaking his electronics".
With ID checks, device attestation and a device required for any transaction, and all this data piped in to a central brain (none of which are far fetched), we're all pretty much buggered.
It is a matter of time until advertising companies claw their way in, insurances calculate individual premiums based on behaviour, and remember, we're all one legislation away from being governed by lunatics.
They'll call you in for a routine scan of your thoughts to make sure you haven't been up to any wrongthink.
Will be interesting to see if this leads to more Linux systems being deployed. Then again with systemd supporting age sniffing (https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40954), evading this becomes harder and harder.
> Everything you say CAN and WILL be used against you.
Especially when what you said has already been recorded and tied to your identity before you faced the authorities.
Edit: from last week https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48632269
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg
As the internet become the place where people do a lot of things, no government (and especially no security services) will be able to keep themselves from trying to control it or at least monitor it. And with the new LLM features they can automatically do much more than before.
Human nature is a constant and when the government sees an easy way to enforce something, many more bureaucrats will try to do it.
If you're located in, say, Norway - and send someone who is also located in Norway a message via Messenger, there's a good likelihood that message will go to some foreign located Meta server, and back to Norway.
When this was being implemented, there was some noise and protests from experts, but that's about it. For the general population it went quietly and without notice.
Wondering if someone can explain the logic
I know that reads like I'm being snarky, but I'm not trying to be. Within the last decade in the UK we have had (among others):
- the 2016 Snoopers' Charter
- the 2022 Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act
- the 2023 Public Order Act
- the 2023 Online Safety Act
- the 2024 Addendum to the 2016 Snoopers' Charter
Couple that with the whole push to repeal the 1998 Human Rights Act and withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights, and the fact we've started imprisoning pensioners for holding up signs, and it's really difficult to _not_ see exactly where this leaves us.
I wish I could look away and get on with my life, but I can't - and I'm starting to realise that that is also part of the design. The increasing reluctance to express controversial opinion online isn't an accidental side effect of all of this legislation. It is intended behaviour, the desired outcome.
The internet needs new spaces that are more decentralized and less in bed with governments.
We already lost our freedom when we agreed to move from IRC to Discord, from phpBB to Reddit, etc.
The teenagers who are blocked from mainstream social media will deliver us new free online spaces that are better than what they're blocked from.
Big companies will benefit the most from these regulations. It's just good ol regulatory capture. They will have the most resources to comply with the laws. They have a captive audience that will be more willing to give up their personal info when asked — keep in mind Facebook and instagram is widely used for business. It is your small time forum admin who would rather shut down his hobbyist online community that never made him any money anyway than to ask for IDs. We have already seen stories of websites shutting down due to existing UK regulations. Curiously, all small, personal operations, not the kind of corporate social media they tell you the laws are meant to target.
All they need to do is popularize the idea of "if your website doesn't do X, it'll place lower on google" and people will do anything.
My websites still don't have cookie banners and the police still hasn't come to my house. And the websites uses cookies like every other website always did.
Much like the GDPR notices that a small industry of 'compliance' product companies sold seemingly to everyone as necessary, they aren't if you're only using cookies for functional reasons and not tracking people. Unfortunately that leads to lower margins for advertisers and we can't have that.
Seriously, do people not look at history or at least the world around them when they make such claims? Genocides have happened before we had internet, or TV, or radio, or any modern technology people attribute genocides to. Hatred and violence are parts of human nature and trying to blame it on technology is just us trying not to make ourselves look bad.
> Genocides have happened before we had internet, or TV, or radio, or any modern technology people attribute genocides to.
Genocides became more frequent every since we have technology. Technology facilitates genocides. Both by creating actual means of killing (industrial killing in WWII) and by creating conditions for distribution of "work". Radio specifically was instrumental in Rwanda.
Which actual genocide would you be talking about?
I really don’t think people should water out words like that over what is essentially tiny political differences.
Facebook has said it agrees with a report that found it had failed to prevent its platform being used to "incite offline violence" in Myanmar. The independent report, commissioned by Facebook, said the platform had created an "enabling environment" for the proliferation of human rights abuse. It comes after widespread violence against the Rohingya minority which the UN has said may amount to genocide.
I really don’t think people should minimize actual historical and current events for political purposes. Knee jerk "bad things are inconvenient, therefore they did not happened" denial is how we got here.
> essentially tiny political differences
The political differences between actual fascism that is on the rise, its actual opposition and those in between are large. Not small. Also, in more recent events there were pogroms in Belfast now. Elon Musk personally contributed to their incitement.
It is foolish to assume we can innovate our way around the law as opposed to talking with lawmakers to oppose the law before it gets on the books.
Mandating age verification and the inevitable implementation requirements are bad for freedom.
Behaviour changes and innovations will mitigate some of the negatives, but bad things are bad.
theres a place for group chats and tight communities but we also need global spaces where you can reach anyone. you cant promote your new album or start organizing a union or share some really good pics with the world if all you have is individual servers.
https://www.bmj.com/content/393/bmj-2026-363695
> Conclusions: Despite the intent of the Social Media Minimum Age Act 2024 to delay access to social media platforms and reduce the potential for online harms, little evidence was found of immediate substantive reductions in reported social media use by adolescents under 16 years.
We are training teenagers that laws are stupid and can be circumvented easily and without consequences. As well as continuing to subject them to the harms of social media, only now without any means of monitoring them or holding the social media companies responsible.
Unless you expect the teenagers to run underground mesh radio networks and risk FCC's hammer (real jailtime), it's just wishful thinking.
Everyone else can stay anonymous.
I look forward to hearing why that won't work and what problems it will cause.
Comment 2: “it can’t be that way because of this”
Comment 3: “but it can, because it could maybe be this way”
You: “There was no hypothetical”
Oh my god the comments are getting so stupid. Please, I beg you to stop.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnival_in_Italy#Venice
"The tradition of wearing masks seems to stem from the 13th century. During the ages the Venetians disguised themselves with mask whenever they thought necessary. It allowed them to escape from the rigid rules of the class hierarchy. All classes could mingle, men could be women, women could be men. It also led to unwanted behaviour, from throwing eggs filled with ink to all imaginable kinds of vulgarities. Masks made people unrecognisable, so they could not be prosecuted.
Near the end of the Republic, the right to wear masks in daily life was severely restricted. By the 18th century, it was limited to three months starting at December 26 and ending on the last day of Carnival, Shrove Tuesday. Masks were also used in ceremonies, eg. when ambassadors arrived and at the five ritual grand banquets offered each year to Venetian dignitaries by the doge. This resembles the Masquerade Balls during Carnival nowadays. Venetian noblemen and noblewomen wore a costume called a bautta consisting of a white mask (volto), a tricorn hat (tricorno), a hood worn under the hat (zendale) and a tabarro, a loose-fitting cloak. There were subtle differences between noble and non-noble (cittadini or popolani), and the popolani were known to wear more colorful, fun masks to festivities like the bull runs."
https://www.carnival-in-venice.eu/venetian-carnival-masks.ht...
You need to explain to and convince those parents that this will result in something worse.
Better yet, how about - "call your representatives"?
Some nerds, for lack of a better term, think crypto and cryptography are the answers to every privacy problem. The only way to fix society and the law is by engaging with those things. Not sidestepping them with cryptography, an unscalable approach in any case.
I'm deeply pessimistic about the future. The only group competent enough to oppose identity verification has its head in the sand.
I'm trying to push for surveillance regulation where I live. I'm there monthly.
Calling your representative is the best way to realise that they don't give a fuck. Yesterday I was editing a clip of one of them lying overtly. It will be a minor inconveniences.
what we call democracy is a dog and ponies show.
So maybe cryptography is not that ridiculous, after all
Trying to one to one with a representative or a council just sends them a signal to not care. You're one of n constituents. Showing up to the city council meeting without bringing an exponential curve of people with you over a short enough amount of time in support of your cause simply confirms to your representatives your cause is marginal.
If you are already cutting clips you might as well bite the bullet and run for office. Best of luck with your foray in democracy!
Get more people with you. Or convince a group that's previously established trust in your jurisdiction to join you in speaking out. Or find out what causes the policymakers do care about and think of a compelling way to frame arguments against age verification in those terms. Heck - if you can get a local government agency to officially back you up, all the better.
There's more to politics than just going to town hall meetings or sending emails or making phone calls!
That just means not enough people did it.
> So maybe cryptography is not that ridiculous, after all
Until they make that illegal. What'll you do then?
It. Doesn't. Scale.
If we wish to preserve the values we grew up with, we need both.
Raise the bar for a data breach. It has value. Much more value if the law did a much better job of restricting what is collected in the first place and its dissemination.
Why should it be different on the internet ? Provided we live in countries where freedom of speech is enacted.
Of course in Russia or china it's different but surely they already have tools like that.
What makes you suggest otherwise?
Dark jokes and strong opinions are example - you something filthy - let's say dark Holocaust/Nazi joke but funny in situation In group that accept it and it's ok. But if it's recorded, it'll stay forever and will surface in most unexpected moment, like job interview or some other screening by gov/corpos.
Don't say that dirty jokes should be punished in future if in given situation they were received as ok and only later someone else, not in situation is going to judge it
People have got into trouble for having retold a controversial joke that they had heard, when the reason they retold had been because they themselves had been upset about it.
I too don't think that holocaust jokes should be accepted, but sometimes people say things because they don't know better at the time. There have been cases of people retelling "dog whistles" without having understood their contextual meaning for certain groups. I've even seen politicians use the phrase "Works sets you free" without understanding why it is inappropriate. People learn and change, but old posts can linger on the Internet for a long time.
What if you brain storm a book/plot idea with a friend aloud and moments later the police knocks on your door because some system said you are about to commit a crime?
A situation that should be impossible due to freedom of speech.
- assault / terror threats
- extortion / blackmail
- fraud
- conspiracy / solicitation to commit a crime
- treason / sedition
- perjury
- slander
This is much bigger than saying something illegal on the internet. This is about not being able to criticize your government without fear of retribution. Or how about if this was possible 60 years ago. Gays would have been all caught and gay rights never emerged. Or say you are discussing wanting an abortion and are arrested for arrested for it because at that point in time it is made illegal. The right to have private communication is integral to a free and democratic society. Morals change. Beliefs change. This is good. If you are monitored for everything we will be oppressed and stuck with no way to progress and grow.
The weather is a bit rainy now but there is sun in the forecast for afternoon.
^^^ that is all we have left to discuss already in personal conversations at work anyways.
Because you know their motivations. You've spoken to 'them'.
In Australia there is no chance of anything happening, because the courts ruled that payouts were limited to provable incurred losses. You pirated a movie? The maximum awarded at the end of a court case is going to be about $20, and as you can't buy very much lawyer-time for $20, it's never taken to court and the copyright-holders have effectively stopped pursuing people here.
If you ask any millenial, none of this bs existed during our time, parents wouldn't think twice to educate you, if you know you know haha
That statement is weird in itself because said parents are yesterday's millenial.
Add to that how companies and governments are trying to become a China. You cannot silence those that you don't know who they are.
Ohh did you say something a politician or a cop didn't like??? Now they can hunt you down and force you to delete the post or whatever.
Sci-fi movies are no longer just si-fi movies, it is easier than never to:
1. Know how you are and all the consequence behind that
2. Be a victim of identity theft. Look at how many millions of personal information including passports have been leaked into the dark web. In 2026, if you have the right skill and like doing the wrong thing, you can be anyone because their name, address, phone, photo, passporte, everything, is right there.
What gives me peace of mind is that by the time everything goes to shit, I am not longer in this world lmao haha
Thats not true, as displayed by the recent Afroman case.
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/03/19/entertainment/afroman-law...
Ok. So what does it mean to revoke the right for someone to become parents? Be honest and be specific.
I'll call it out because your article doesn't, but does reference Australia. Here our eSafety commissioner has set the requirements such that the use of Government ID for verification must not be the only option.
There are other age verification technologies that do not assign identity but use other means as a method to identify age. For example, when our ban came into play I wasn't all of a sudden required to offer my ID.
This is the thing that so upsetting with the discourse. Privacy is already eroded, its just by private companies, not the state. All social networks have a gateway for law enforcement that allows getting extra details about users.
There is another gateway with ISPs to correlate IPs with end users.
In the USA you can just buy most of that info through brokers.
Sure, people who takes precautions it takes extra work, but for dave on facebook, its pretty automatic.
I really wish people would foccus on that bit, because the way to get privacy back is to get a handle on social media companies(and google). They are the ones who've eroded our privacy, and if we just say "Oooo age gating is bad mmkay" without a viable alternative, then we'll all get something worse.
The solution is to limit what social media companies can profit from, so _they_ can regulate what shit they put in front of kids eyes. They can totally do it (after all how much porn is actually hosted on youtube? its really really hard, because they put in place systems to stop it.)
Can you trust future governments to respect "Nulla poena sine lege"?
Nobody would support a "give away my anonymity online so I can be shown an ad for Coca Cola" bill. But it's easier to sell a law to boomers and lawmakers if you use the disguise of "It's for the children ." As if any of these companies care about the well being of children. See Meta confirming their platforms affect the mental health of children and doing nothing about it. Also platforms like TikTok and YouTube optimizing their algorithms for stealing user's attention spans.
If they cannot distinguish real people from bots they can just charge more for more ads shown !
Hacker news has a doomscroll front page. Ive never notice you have a problem with it
None of this is new. Every single one of these things has been pointed out millennia ago.
You had already evaluated it and made your decision (against censorship) on this decades ago when you first came across it.
Changing your view now isn't a matter of new information coming to light. It's a matter of you disliking the obvious and inevitable consequences that you had been warned of going into it.
Perhaps it's time you stop changing your mind based on totalitarian propaganda and realize you don't know what you're doing, and stop supporting censorship.
It is a catastrophically dangerous idea, and it's exactly what the abusive social media companies want.
I think this Cloudflare business ties into it, although it is masquerading as bot protection.
Age restriction has been around for longer than the internet itself, so its regulators applying that logic to the online world.
Whilst I think age verification has its issues, I don't see what other options they actually have. I'll also make the point that in Australia, our regulations explicitly require that Government ID verification CANNOT be the only way and that companies must adopt an additional approach.
Almost everything in technology used to protect us can be used against us by those want or choosing to do the wrong thing, does that mean we don't do anything?
If you want your kids to not see porn on the internet, cool. Don't give them Internet access. You don't need to make the internet worse for me and my family to make that rule for your family.
And maybe if you are parenting your child well, at some point you will be able to trust them to use the internet in a responsible way.
And there are all sorts of reasons governments want to do this, up to and including the stated-on-the-surface reasons they give; a lot of people don't want their kids exposed to internet harms, be that extreme material or addictive services and doom-scrolling, and don't have the technical know-how to effect that themselves.
The insistence by so many in tech that there is no honest intent and that there is no way to practically provide age verification in a thoughtful, anonymous way is frustrating.
It's frustrating to see so many people engaged in effective conspiratorial thinking and it's frustrating because there are many good arguments to be had here, but they won't land if the 'anti' side doesn't address the real concerns that real people have about the safety and mental health of their kids.
If there were honest intent, then the regs would be beefing up the "Parental Controls" mechanisms present in every major OS and commanding that there be fines for not respecting those settings. Not only does this mechanism require zero involvement of an unrelated third party, it allows a guardian to protect both a child too ignorant of the dangers of the world to be trusted to competently handle them and an adult whose mind has been so damaged by age and/or disease that they can no longer handle those same dangers.
Instead, the systems that we're getting are ones in which computer users are -when it's not mandatory- very, very strongly encouraged to present photo ID to a third party. While all the US regs I can find currently "only" require adding mechanisms for punching in a birth date, it's all but certain that continued evidence of minors lying about their age will cause those laws to be "upgraded" to require a photo ID.
Not everyone knows they exist, and there's a huge install base of older and/or cheaper devices that may not be getting updates that could be strengthened like this.
> Not only does this mechanism require zero involvement of an unrelated third party
But what if we do want to regulate the behaviour of those third parties? We know they've been cognisant of the harms and addictive behaviours their stuff promotes (see internal Meta research), and in fact seem to have designed for that. If the controls are only at the consumer side, are we not likely to see an arms race where they continue to try to addict kids around the controls?
You're also assuming a level of technical sophistication on the part of parents, voters and politicians that would necessarily lead them to come to the same conclusions as yourself about solutions. This may simply not be present.
This is what I mean by "good arguments that won't land". We can talk about how solutions should work, whether solutions can possibly work, and even make strong arguments that regulation in this area is wrong in and of itself. Jumping straight to "they're all liars and only want to spy on me" makes the entire thing look like a group of fringe nutters unable to take onboard how people (particularly non-tech people) feel.
"Oddly", the laws that demand you enter your birthday (and will eventually demand you scan your ID) seem to require OS producers to make it so that users will not be ignorant of these new features. [0] I wonder if it's possible to do the same thing for Parental Controls...?
> ...there's a huge install base of older and/or cheaper devices that may not be getting updates that could be strengthened like this.
They're not going to be getting updated to be compliant with any of the new state (or Federal) user-identification regs, so I don't see what good-faith reason you could have for bringing them up.
> But what if we do want to regulate the behaviour of those third parties?
You use law and regulation? You mention nothing in your subsequent paragraphs that a "Papers, Please!" mechanism will prevent that a "Beefed-up and difficult-to-bypass Parent Controls" mechanism will not.
[0] For example, AB1043 says (among other things)
I mean, 'papers please' mechanisms are a type of law and regulation, we're arguing over what sort of law and regulation should be used, no?
In Australia, platforms are being regulated, the regulation says they must not allow under 16s to have accounts. How they achieve this is up to them to a large extent. "Papers-please" then is their doing. It's certainly not the only way things can be done - see anonymous credentials, verifiable credentials and other such schemes that don't involve showing your identification documents to everyone that asks.
> You mention nothing in your subsequent paragraphs that a "Papers, Please!" mechanism will prevent that a "Beefed-up and difficult-to-bypass Parent Controls" mechanism will not.
An arms race to work around the controls, which seems likely to me unless there is some sort of regulation on the service providers.
But either way, look at this! We're discussing how things might work, rather than dismissing things out of hand and impugning each others' motives. Going to the "Papers please" governments and parents in those populations, saying "Look, we understand there is concern and we think there's a better way", or even "We understand the concern but here's why acting on it in any way is a bad idea" is a lot better than "You're all evil and probably stupid".
Yes, they are. I still have no idea how laws of the form "You must honor the signals you get from Beefed-Up Parental Controls and we fine or jail you if you do not" fails to constrain the behavior of US-based businesses. You seem to have an understanding of how it won't, so do let me know what I'm missing?
> An arms race to work around the controls,
Whether the arms race is server-side or client-side is irrelevant. If anything, I'd expect a client-side implementation to be far more robust... if for no other reason than because the private company that is contracted to implement and run a server-side implementation will cut every corner to improve their profit margins.
> In Australia...
Speaking from a civil-liberties perspective, Australia has been a shithole for a long time now. They can very safely be ignored by US parents and US lawmakers.
> "You're all evil and probably stupid".
The people who are pushing for these "Papers Please!" regs are evil. The lawmakers (and parents) who aren't asking "Wait, what about the existing Parental Controls mechanisms built into every major OS?" are stupid and -if that stupidity is willful- also evil. Those are plain facts. One is not obligated to be all niceys to people who are invested in tearing yet another chunk out of the vial organs of civic life.
> If anything, I'd expect a client-side implementation to be far more robust...
You're not really describing a client-side solution, you're describing legislation of something like the old Do Not Track header, which is a server-side solution, and fines for services which don't respect it. In such a situation I would expect 'smart' firms like Meta to start finding just-this-side-of-legal ways to get kids hooked on their services. But I suppose the same is likely to happen with server-side-verified blocks on kids using services, Meta can spin up new services that don't quite meet the definition and try to work around it. I guess this is orthoganal to the method of blocking kids.
> from a civil-liberties perspective Australia has been a shithole for a long time now. They can very safely be ignored by US parents and US lawmakers.
Even though what they are doing is less "Papers please" and more "Services must verify, how it's done is up to you", which seems lower down your evil scale than the US states you're up in arms about?
Interesting take.
But again, this is fine, it's an exchange of ideas. You don't seem to be against age verification in principle, you're acknowledging that people want something done. The article and many commenters here are immediately writing off everything in this area as effectively a distraction from full monitoring of everything everyone does on the net.
So while we may disagree entirely on how to go about effecting any sort of solution, and we may not (honestly I'm not entirely averse to the parental controls idea), you're not dismissing the problem out of hand, and in general I have no quarrel with you or your approach.
I suppose you missed the part where I said
This "You must present ID to use a computer" shit is relatively new.> You're not really describing a client-side solution, you're describing legislation of something like the old Do Not Track header, which is a server-side solution...
Mmm. No, there are three systems being described here.
1) "Beefed up Parental Controls", where all service-restriction information is entered and stored client-side and sent server-side as needed.
2) "Age Please!", where a "guardian account" associates the birthdate/year of one or more users to their respective accounts using the client device. This information is entered and stored client-side and is sent server-side as needed.
3) "Papers Please!" -which is what #2 will become-, where a user uses their client device to photograph their government-issued photo ID to be sent to a third-party and processed server-side.
Because we're talking about accessing an Internet-hosted service, your apparent confusion about the need to send some information to the services servers is -itself- confusing.
> You don't seem to be against age verification in principle...
I'm 100% against it. I'm 100% for guardian-controlled content-restriction policies. I'm also completely fine with a "How old is your cutie? What things do you want them to not see or do?" wizard that populates those policies with some defaults that the guardian can fine-tune if they wish to.
> It's not even about being "all niceys" it's about recognising that the concern people have is genuinely held, and addressing it.
An equally important skill is recognizing when those concerns are not genuinely held. Anyone who should know about "Parental Controls" and chooses "Papers Please!" or "Age Please!" is evil. Lawmakers and regulators pushing for this stuff are in this bucket. Anyone who -once introduced to the concept- claims to see no world in which "Parental Controls" can be beefed up and also claims that "Age Please!" or "Papers Please!" is the only viable option is -at minimum- unrecoverably stupid, and is probably also evil.
The part that I quoted? That would be quite a feat. Either way I think it's definitely a choice to entirely ignore what a country is doing in this area due to historical reasons, when the country you're interested in making changes to appears to be doing worse.
> Mmm. No, there are three systems being described here.
There are more than three options here. Here are more possibilities (already in use in some places) -
4. Service providers make an informed guess about who might be a kid, based on usage patterns and scanning the pictures they've uploaded.
5. Anonymous credentials systems, as described in the link in my first post that you responded to.
Neither of these is a 'papers please' solution.
> your apparent confusion about the need to send some information to the services servers is -itself- confusing.
So you're also implicitly ignoring solution 6, which a lot of people elsewhere in this thread are arguing for, which is parents using existing parental control systems built into their devices, which work 100% client side?
> I'm 100% for guardian-controlled content-restriction policies.
That's age verification of a sort by the guardian, enforced server-side. So no, you're not against these systems in principle, you're just proposing a solution that you find palatable.
> Anyone who should know about "Parental Controls" and chooses "Papers Please!" or "Age Please!" is evil.
Why? Parental controls at the moment are patchy, poorly understood and certainly don't operate in the way you're proposing they should in future. It's easy to see why people might declare that such schemes are inadequate.
I am finding it very funny that you are determined to put yourself in the category of "People Nursie disagrees with because they dismiss the entire thing as a conspiracy", even while you're not actually doing that, you're arguing in good faith and I applaud it!
I'm 100% fine with those, but people report that they're "insufficient" for vague reasons. That's why I suggest we beef them up. Also...
> Why? Parental controls at the moment are patchy, poorly understood and certainly don't operate in the way you're proposing they should in future.
you seem to agree with the reports I'm hearing. That's why I suggest beefing them up.
> The part that I quoted? That would be quite a feat.
One that you managed, somehow. Gratz.
> ...they dismiss the entire thing as a conspiracy
Unless you're using the "Two or more people get together to plan something" definition of the word "conspiracy" -which happens to neatly cover planning to go to lunch-, I don't consider this to be a conspiracy. [0]
> There are more than three options here.
I was only discussing three, and I'm sure we can come up with way more than five in total, but sure, let's go.
> 4. Service providers make an informed guess...
That's happening now and has been for a while now. We all see how willing the larger operators are to rely on their guesses rather than relying on the judgment of a third-party. Having said that... when last I checked, 4chan was one of the operators who are doing the noble thing in the face of all this hysteria. [1] It sure is something when 4chan is on the right side of an issue and the big guys aren't.
> 5. Anonymous credentials systems...
They're absolutely not going to be anonymous in practice. As I mentioned earlier:
> That's age verification of a sort by the guardian...Absolutely not. Do explain where the restricted account has either its age, documents that contain its user's age, or documents that can be used to look up its user's age entered into it. A helpful hint is to ask yourself how you'd distinguish between the content restrictions set for a precocious eleven-year-old and those set for an adult suffering from both PTSD and advanced dementia who needs to be protected from both scammers and graphic depictions of sex and violence.
[0] Yes, I read ahead to the end of the sentence I quoted. The statement to which this footnote is attached is included for completeness' sake.
[1] <https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c624330lg1ko>
Yet the powerful continue to insist on "papers, please" anonymity-rending personal authentication over anonymous authorization. It's not often that the villains of history so clearly identify themselves.
My bunch is that the people driving this stuff were unaware that age verification could be privacy-preserving and can't exactly back down now.
‘If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him”
There is a huge difference between protecting children and prosecuting/punishing children. Age verification can only be an implementation of the latter.
Complaints had been made against the man for years and been thrown out because of who he was, and the material was only found by accident.
This same individual had been yet another one of those arguing for tighter controls on the internet and free speech for the peasants.
Another one of these "one rule for me, another for thee" types.
I always find this form of argument in favor of privacy (which is valuable in its own right to be clear) so roundabout. If you’re concerned about the government impinging on your freedom of speech, then why not write an essay arguing for expansive freedom of speech protections? That seems like a much more direct solution to the problem presented in this essay.
https://www.ksat.com/news/local/2025/10/15/i-feel-like-i-can...