Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Discord distances from age verification firm after ties to Peter Thiel surface

kotaku.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 138 posts

Re: Discord distances from age verification firm after ties to Peter Thiel surface

#101

Post by Hikikomori »

JPKab wrote: post #86
Hikikomori wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And should not forget that Garry Tan the ycombinatior CEO attends the same church where Thiel held his Greta antichrist talk.

Garry is a good person and smearing people over their church is a disgusting thing to do. I am now going to sit here and listen to this talk because I guarantee it's not saying what you think it's saying. And I don't want to listen to it. It's not a topic that interests me. But I guarantee you are completely distorting what was stated in that topic for maximum effect, entirely motivated by left-wing politics.

Going by your comment history any criticism of Thiel and the administration is just left wing politics, but hard to hear you over the sound of drowning yourself with kool-aid.

Weird that you seem to support this administration that Thiel is very much associated with but find it offensive when there's a very clear association between Thiel and Garry. He's just going to this specific church to pray or whatever? Paying no mind to the anti-christ talk happening next door. I do hope this is the last breaths of religion in the western world, it needs to die.

Re: Discord distances from age verification firm after ties to Peter Thiel surface

#102

Post by xethos »

rawgreaze wrote: post #82
api wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a network. You can move but will your community? We are absolute slaves to network effects. How many things do you continue to use even though you hate them because everyone else also continues to use them even though most hate them? Defeating the dragon of the network effect would be a great victory for human empowerment in the 21st century.

>Defeating the dragon of the network effect would be a great victory for human empowerment in the 21st century. Creating the network effect was the greatest loss we had in the 21st century. We used to be able to use XMPP to talk to Google Hangouts, Facebook Messenger and all sorts, and they took it away, just so you'd have to use their shitty little program instead.

We have that today though - it's called Matrix. While other platforms aren't literally built upon it like Hangouts was in the beforetimes, it allows inter-op with more platforms. Whatsapp, Telegram, Discord, Facebook Messenger, Signal, Google Chat (née Google Hangouts)... and those are just the ones I'm using. The full list includes more [0]

We can disagree about what counts as good enough for the mass market in the modern era, whether normal people will actually use this vs whether normal people used XMPP's interop in 2005, and quibble about feature sets (video calls weren't initially supported in '05, and most bridges don't support them today), but for chatting with friends, you still only need one app - and because Matrix is an open standard, you can even change which app you want it to be.

Post script: I look forward to hearing about how terrible Matrix was, last time someone tried the (over-crowded) default server 12-18 months ago. The software dev community here will follow up and say that software cannot have gotten better since then, either.

[0] https://matrix.org/ecosystem/bridges/

Re: Discord distances from age verification firm after ties to Peter Thiel surface

#103

Post by MiddleEndian »

uyzstvqs wrote: post #45

Can't we just do this age verification locally on-device? Just some WASM to run a small AI model, which scans face+ID. I know it'll be easier to bypass, but that does not matter. We're trying to stop children, not adults with technical skill.

It's even easier to just not do it at all

Re: Discord distances from age verification firm after ties to Peter Thiel surface

#104

Post by pavel_lishin »

xethos wrote: post #102
rawgreaze wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Defeating the dragon of the network effect would be a great victory for human empowerment in the 21st century. Creating the network effect was the greatest loss we had in the 21st century. We used to be able to use XMPP to talk to Google Hangouts, Facebook Messenger and all sorts, and they took it away, just so you'd have to use their shitty little program instead.

We have that today though - it's called Matrix. While other platforms aren't literally built upon it like Hangouts was in the beforetimes, it allows inter-op with more platforms. Whatsapp, Telegram, Discord, Facebook Messenger, Signal, Google Chat (née Google Hangouts)... and those are just the ones I'm using. The full list includes more [0] We can disagree about what counts as good enough for the mass market in the…

> you can even change which app you want it to be.

From a limited set of options.

My friends are the mass market. You and I are savvy, tech folks and we know what Matrix is. I've got friends who work as car mechanics, secretaries, teachers, etc. They're not dumb, they can spend the time to figure out which app will work best for them on their computers and phones, but they don't particularly want to spend their time fiddling with software on their computer. I love them, and they love me, but do they love me enough to go through this rigamarole just to share Star Trek memes and talk about our days?

For all its faults, Discord is easy, and it's good. They've put in a lot of polish, and it just works, and it's well supported. Convincing them to move away means that at best, I'm taking on the role of tech support for... potentially dozens of people? Except it won't be that many, because I doubt that many of them will move.

Discord will have to get catastrophically bad before they strongly consider moving off of it, and I would bet you twenty US dollary-doos that the first place we'll move to will be Slack.

Network effects, man.

Re: Discord distances from age verification firm after ties to Peter Thiel surface

#105

Post by pavel_lishin »

Hawxy wrote: post #29
Morromist wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As Argento Dragone said in the Kotaku comments: "Face scanning is used to do ID verification on your device and then deleted immediately." "By immediately I mean we send it to k-ID who said that's what they do." "By that I mean they partnered with Persona to do the actual verification." "Persona clarified that by 'immediately' they mean 'after seven days.'" "And given their ties to Palantir, it's probably fine. You t…

> "By immediately I mean we send it to k-ID who said that's what they do." People have already validated this fyi. When k-ID was first added you could send a bogus age result to discord from your local device, which probably still works. There's no evidence your facial scans leave the device. > "By that I mean they partnered with Persona to do the actual verification." Which isn't true, it was a UK-only experiment be…

How many people in how many countries does it take before the lie becomes sufficiently flagrant?

Re: Discord distances from age verification firm after ties to Peter Thiel surface

#106

Post by numpad0 »

notyourwork wrote: post #49
uyzstvqs wrote: post #45

Can't we just do this age verification locally on-device? Just some WASM to run a small AI model, which scans face+ID. I know it'll be easier to bypass, but that does not matter. We're trying to stop children, not adults with technical skill.

Is a face scan accurate enough to do that with 100% accuracy?

Face scan is a total dice roll full of bias, whatever you do. With or without ML.

Re: Discord distances from age verification firm after ties to Peter Thiel surface

#107

Post by 8cvor6j844qw_d6 »

rockskon wrote: post #12

"Discord Distances itself from Peter Thiel's Palantir Age Verification Firm" means jack shit if they're still doing business with them. And Discord has approached this in such a monstrously awful way that I don't know what they could possibly say at this point to make me believe them. I fully expect Discord will buddy-buddy right back up with some other Thiel-affiliated company if there is a separation if not go righ…

Just realized Discord uses Persona, which is also used by LinkedIn for verification.

Re: Discord distances from age verification firm after ties to Peter Thiel surface

#108

Post by jacquesm »

dgxyz wrote: post #59
foldr wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but if you are using Thiel as a point of reference, you’re going to find a midpoint between sanity and insanity, which isn’t the truth. Say what you will about Thunberg, but she is not insane in the way that Thiel is.

[flagged]

Compared to Thiel Thunberg is the voice of reason. Actually, she is the voice of reason compared to a lot of wealthy and powerful people. And that's why they're scared shitless of her: you can't really argue with someone who has nothing to lose and speaks truth to power like that.

Thunberg has issues, sure. She's pretty open about them too. But that has zero bearing on her various positions and they are as solid as they are ethically clean. As always, there are people that would love to 'shoot the messenger' and in many cases this appears as a rather literal proposition. So far it hasn't happened but I'm afraid that one of these days it will. We need her. Far, far more than we need Thiel.

Re: Discord distances from age verification firm after ties to Peter Thiel surface

#109

Post by jacquesm »

dgxyz wrote: post #70
foldr wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, you're suggesting an equivalence between someone who has strong views and someone who's simply disconnected from reality. Thunberg is right to be concerned about the environment. You could argue that she's too concerned (maybe). Thiel is not right to be worried about the antichrist and Armageddon. We don't need to find some kind of mythical middle ground between people who are too worried about the antichrist…

It’s not the environmental campaigning that’s the issue. I am very much aligned with that. In fact I’ve done a fair bit of that myself and you’ll occasionally find me at demonstrations. I think most people are well aligned with that. It’s the deep dive into geopolitics which is now being used to discredit her that is the problem. There’s things you don’t touch with a pole and she’s been all over them. That’s why the…

> She did a lot of damage to the environmental cause getting involved.

No she didn't. She pointed out there is hypocrisy on both sides of these arguments. Environmental causes are not immune to being hijacked and there has been plenty of that.

Re: Discord distances from age verification firm after ties to Peter Thiel surface

#110

Post by uyzstvqs »

fooqux wrote: post #60
uyzstvqs wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, and that'd be the best method by far. A European politician recently proposed this.[0] The issue is that a single service can't just implement this. If I'm a service and I need age verification, I need something that I can implement by myself. [0] https://democrats.eu/en/protecting-minors-online-without-vio...

> The issue is that a single service can't just implement this. If I'm a service and I need age verification, I need something that I can implement by myself. I don't understand. A simple if age<18 check is quite a lot easier to implement than doing age verification yourself, or even shopping it out to some other "partner".

It'd be even simpler. If a device is in Child Mode (which would be activated by parents during setup, and require a separate PIN to disable), it'd respond with status.isMinor = true. Or even simpler, make it a HTTP header.

What I meant is that it doesn't exist yet. It'd require operating systems, apps, browsers, etc, to all implement this system before a company like Discord can actually use it.

Post reply on HN