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Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

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Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#101

Post by JohnFen »

alwa wrote: post #38
MBCook wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just how bad this is would depend on how they stored the data, I guess. Why does it feel like they probably keep WAY more data than they need instead of just the hash? Glad they’ve been shut down at least.

Molly White points out [0] that they seem to have gotten awfully vague about what they store, emphasizing in some contexts that the hashes on the chain are all that technically HAVE to be retained (and encouraging the assumption that those themselves are rigorously impossible to extrapolate personal information from)— but also insinuating to people at en-Orb-ment that they need to opt in to letting the company store…

> emphasizing in some contexts that the hashes on the chain are all that technically HAVE to be retained

Even the context of the primary reason they cite for collecting retinal data (to prevent the same person from getting $50 multiple times) requires they keep this data for at least as long as they're paying people to scan their eyeballs.

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#102

Post by ramesh31 »

kayamon wrote: post #90
ramesh31 wrote: post #42

Taxation and control of the money supply is the single most powerful and fundamental right reserved by a government, and it's backed up by lots and lots of guns. Godspeed with changing that, crypto bros.

Do you solve all your problems by shooting people?

> Do you solve all your problems by shooting people?

All power on earth emanates from the barrel of a gun. We abstract that fact away in modern polite society, but it is the base level truth of our existence.

So yes, when it comes down to it, governments can, will, (and have) used guns to solve this.

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#103

Post by kbenson »

scrps wrote: post #86
boppo1 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, if I talk to a 'normie' and explain that chatGPT and OpenAI are nefariously plotting regulatory capture most will roll their eyes at me. If I say "The founder of OpenAI is scanning people's eyeballs to build a database" that sets off real alarm bells.

I would hope both would set off alarm bells but I guess at least one of them inducing trepidation is cause enough these days for guarded optimism.

One of them is easy to include in thrilling action movies that allows the idea and risk to enter public consciousness, and the other is something that economics wonks and people interested in how business works at high levels look at.

Protagonist 1: "I don't get it, why are they doing this? What do they have to gain?"

Protagonist 2: "I don't know, unless... oh my god, it's regulatory capture!"

Protagonist 1: "Shit, of course! What will we do?"

Audience: Laughs at this shit being played so straight it comes off as a farce.

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#104

Post by sdenton4 »

jabradoodle wrote: post #63
sdenton4 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly, I liked the original idea behind this, and thought it was one of the few actually-interesting applications of crypto currency. If you can (somehow) solve the unique identity problem, you can design a Universal Basic Income using a crypto-currency as backing. The Unique ID problem isn't solved by the blockchain, though, so it ends up being a total mess.

What does this mean? You already have a unique identity as far as the government are concerned, and who would pay UBI if not the government.

Crypto schemes allow a lot of experimentation with the structure of money that no sane government would ever try for fear of crashing their economy in one way or another.

Meanwhile, we /should/ be experimenting a lot more with the structure of economics and society, because the current super-structures have created massive concentrations of power and seemingly-insurmountable collective action problems that threaten the biosphere...

Bitcoin was designed to act like gold, but this was a series of design choices. (as someone, maybe foldingideas, put it: the crypto bros looked at the concentration of wealth in society and decided that the problem was that /they/ weren't the ones with all the wealth.)

You can just as easily design a crypto scheme to generate tokens and distribute them to everyone with an ID regularly: this is UBI, so long as the tokens have recognized value. The problem is that you need to prevent people from registering a million accounts to get a million UBI credits, deflating the value of tokens held by honest folks. Thus the unique identifier problem.

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#105

Post by JohnFen »

MBCook wrote: post #98
alwa wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Molly White points out [0] that they seem to have gotten awfully vague about what they store, emphasizing in some contexts that the hashes on the chain are all that technically HAVE to be retained (and encouraging the assumption that those themselves are rigorously impossible to extrapolate personal information from)— but also insinuating to people at en-Orb-ment that they need to opt in to letting the company store…

Full iris images is exactly what I expect/am afraid of.

I think that hashes of the full iris images aren't much better.

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#106

Post by danpalmer »

tristor wrote: post #28
danpalmer wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bet there's a really well understood data store that contains minimal data and meets various anonymity proofs. And then a tag-manager implementation with MixPanel, Intercom, Amplitude, Heap, FullStory, and Segment, all receiving every interaction with a full JSON object describing the current state of the application and user.

Ugh. This is probably the true nature of the thing, it's shocking how this happens at nearly every company I've been at. Eng is super concerned with privacy and security, and then as soon as Marketing gets a hold of it, it's all coated in 6 layers of analytics for funnel tracking leads.

I need to write a blog post about the time an ad network told me that their required integration was to integrate their JS bundle that would send all text input to their servers.

When I told them No Fucking Way (in not that many more words), they said they would need to get executive sign-off on a "custom" integration. The "custom" bit being us doing everything ourselves server-side and sending them a single opaque identifier for conversions.

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#107

Post by dopidopHN »

littlestymaar wrote: post #77
Ataraxic wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm actually significantly more skeptical of OpenAI after discovering that one of their founders is behind this. The tag line of universal basic income is so absurd for an iris scanner built on the blockchain. Are we still in the world of 0% interest rates???

You can have UBI at a country level if you finance it with government budget (through taxes)[1], but as a for-profit enterprise, there's no that's a good idea (for it to work at all, it must have a monetization strategy, and they all look dystopian) [1] it actually exist(ed) in France (see RMI/RSA, though the different governments recently added tons of bureaucracy to it as a way to deter people from getting it, ruin…

To add :

France minima sociaux are not enough to live on by themselves.

Last time I checked the RSA was around 400 euros / months.

The idea of UBI imply that you can live in a ok way with it.

I have friends who lives with the French RSA, they have previous stash of money to complete it.

One is close to spend only 400/month, but he lives on land he bought with his last job.

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#108

Post by notahacker »

kstrauser wrote: post #82
jabradoodle wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does this mean? You already have a unique identity as far as the government are concerned, and who would pay UBI if not the government.

To the best of my knowledge, the IRS has never scanned my eyeball, and yet I'm still able to send and receive money with them. I'm not getting the UBI angle at all. What part of UBI requires new technology?

The problem it's solving or attempting to solve is "how do I create demand for a token that isn't redeemable for anything (generated by a private organization which intends to profit from exchanging tokens it generates for money)", and the only people that want those are cryptobros. Throw in the eyeball trackers as a "Proof of Personhood" twist on the "restricted supply" story, to go with the usual "future world currency, unlimited demand" spiel

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#109

Post by iraqmtpizza »

littlestymaar wrote: post #77
Ataraxic wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm actually significantly more skeptical of OpenAI after discovering that one of their founders is behind this. The tag line of universal basic income is so absurd for an iris scanner built on the blockchain. Are we still in the world of 0% interest rates???

You can have UBI at a country level if you finance it with government budget (through taxes)[1], but as a for-profit enterprise, there's no that's a good idea (for it to work at all, it must have a monetization strategy, and they all look dystopian) [1] it actually exist(ed) in France (see RMI/RSA, though the different governments recently added tons of bureaucracy to it as a way to deter people from getting it, ruin…

As soon as the money becomes conditional, it's not UBI. If you have to irrevokably sign up to an organ donor list, it's not UBI. UBI is inherently redistributive. Which I happen to think is immoral.

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#110

Post by catchnear4321 »

boppo1 wrote: post #45
Legend2440 wrote: post #36

I really don't want to have anything to do with crypto, and the fact that Sam Altman is pushing it in 2023 makes both him and OpenAI look sketchy. Especially crypto with a weird biometric eye scanner.

Yeah, if I talk to a 'normie' and explain that chatGPT and OpenAI are nefariously plotting regulatory capture most will roll their eyes at me. If I say "The founder of OpenAI is scanning people's eyeballs to build a database" that sets off real alarm bells.

you forgot the part about the shiny metal orb.

it really changes the flavor of it from cambridge analytica to dr evil.

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