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Ask HN: Would this eliminate bots for good?

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Re: Ask HN: Would this eliminate bots for good?

#11
I’m standing in a line on my iPhone, waiting to get into a basketball game. So apologies for being sloppy.

Ok, so you’re talking about technologies that already exist and practically everyone has them.

First, you don’t need a new HTTP protocol, you’d use regular HTTPS with certificate authentication.

The glove you speak of is a biometric device with a Secure Enclave (SE) (eg Apple Watch) or secure access to a device with an SE.

This SE stores the private key of a key pair in a manner inaccessible without biometrics. This is also how PassKeys work.

A key challenge here is that everyone has a variety of devices from a variety of OEMs that are all simultaneously talking to multiple services synchronously. More often than not, a web request actually isn’t initiated by a human.

So, you’ll need to get everyone to agree on a standard. You’ll need to address the privacy concerns of privacy-minded people, because if you can attest that a person is actually there, doing something that is going to set off warning bells for private people. It’s also going to set off dinner bells for advertisers and governments.

Again sorry, I’m on mobile and in a line. These exact scenarios (and their drawbacks) are routinely discussed in technical and privacy circles.

Read up on technologies like PKI, certificate-based Auth, PassKeys, Secure Enclave, and biometric devices. The Apple Platform Security Guide is a good first step on what a commercial product is already doing.

Re: Ask HN: Would this eliminate bots for good?

#12
A new capital-raising occurred to get photographs of palms encoded and onto a blockchain using zero-knowledge proofs.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/polychain-backs-veryai-s-10m-...

Maybe what would work is some type of physical checkpoint where a person can be viewed and confirmed to be human - say at a mobile phone store or really whoever wants to do it. Then again, some people are even averse to being filmed at any store. Not sure if this would work in tandem with another biometric, such as with VeryAI, or this is all that is needed.

Otherwise maybe a type of vending machine could be used with some human-checking devices implemented in it - and that device could be tied into the blockchain.

The issue with all this of course is say you've proved to be human, what happens if you tell your bots the obtained info in order to become an "acting clone" - or rather someone steals the info? So maybe a bi-weekly checkup on that vending machine that acts as a sort dead-man's switch? It's starting to sound unreliable.

There could also be "human-attestation spaces" whereby anyone inside is validated to be human for the time they are present there. Like a cubicle at a library. Not sure what the point would be, though.

Yet, thinking far ahead. At some point, the problem may be human clones and validating an authentically original human. See 'Celebrity Doppelganger Fury' : youtube.com/@CDFury/videos

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