161–170 of 645 posts
The UK government has approved 7 age verification methods. Not one of them meets that standard.
That's not an accident.
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/protecting-children/a...
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You live in a very strange area to say the least. None of those are true in my area, and how did the "Karen" even get to your child on your private road?
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These things don't happen on a liberal/conservative axis in my experience.
I've lived all over the place, though not as much with kids, and have had none of these issues (including having mixed race kids who look much more like their other parent than me).
You really need to look at why you're living where you do.
I was sitting in a room the other day with a young adult, we were searching for additional algorithm learning materials. They searched in Google, and accept the cookies. They clicked on a website, and accepted those cookies too. They then started entering their email address to access another service. I was completely taken aback. I'm the sort of person that either rejects the cookies, or will use another site entire…
I click “accept the cookies” almost every time. I just personally don’t feel it’s worth the effort and cost to try to avoid it.
What “dark pattern cookie trick” are you worried about? I just can’t come up with a scenario where it will actually harm me in any way. All the examples I have heard are either completely implausible, don’t actually seem that bad to me, or are things that are trivially easy to do even without any cookies.
Now, I am not going around giving my real email out to random sites, though, although even that doesn’t strike me as particularly dangerous. I already get infinite spam, and I am sure there are millions of other ways to get my email address… it is supposed to be something you give out, after all.
I just don’t think it is something that is worth stressing out about and fighting against. Maybe I am actually naive, but I just have not yet been convinced I should actually care.
I was sitting in a room the other day with a young adult, we were searching for additional algorithm learning materials. They searched in Google, and accept the cookies. They clicked on a website, and accepted those cookies too. They then started entering their email address to access another service. I was completely taken aback. I'm the sort of person that either rejects the cookies, or will use another site entire…
> It is the young people that are growing up conditioned to press accept It's really alarming, actually. I run the cyber security training & phishing simulations at my work, and it's the younger employees that struggle the most. It's like they just assume that everything on the web is trustworthy. It's not hard to see why though. They grew up with app stores & locked down devices. No concept of a file or file system,…
I think almost every Android user has thise concepts.
But on the trustworthy web assumption, I agree. The only effective remedy is a personal calamity.
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And without having to trust that the government isn't keeping track of every request for age verification? I'd be curious how that might work as I haven't yet seen a zero-trust age verification system.
The age verification proposal of the EU tries to do that, the government knows you used age verification (and I think the rough number of times you used it), but they don't know when or where you used it. https://ageverification.dev/av-doc-technical-specification/d...
This proposal may have been updated since I read it previously, so I could be wrong now, but it didn't read as a true zero-knowledge proof as key steps in the flow still required a level of trusting the government as the central authority to do the right thing and not track requests, both today and in the future.
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Most doesn't event know what cookies too. In fact, most doesn't put extra thought into the things they are clicking/accepting on web. Because of this, I found it odd that the regulation allows displaying the accept cookies button. Instead, it should be rejecting cookies by default and a separate flow to accept tracking cookies (e.g. via account settings page)
Why not have all tracking disabled by default by law and have users opt in through Settings menus?
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> It is the young people that are growing up conditioned to press accept It's really alarming, actually. I run the cyber security training & phishing simulations at my work, and it's the younger employees that struggle the most. It's like they just assume that everything on the web is trustworthy. It's not hard to see why though. They grew up with app stores & locked down devices. No concept of a file or file system,…
People are also struggling to think about what is computed or stored where or what different wireless interfaces do. Imagine what sort of data people enter into LLMs!
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And yet, it's the generation that struggles the most with managing files on their work laptops and on SMB shares. They know app silos, not file system hierarchy. Ask a teenager where a file is on their phone and the will tell you the name of an app. Ask them how to copy it somewhere else, and they'll use the share sheet and send it to another app. High adoption doesn't equate to high literacy.
> Ask them how to copy it somewhere else To be fair, at least Android and presumably iOS grant apps by default no access to your files in modern versions. The only way to get, e. G., an attachment downloaded via Thunderbird to a PC or another app is the share dialogue. A user does not access to the isolated app storage by default on an unrooted Android phone. For better or worse the young user is actually making the…
Note taking apps are a prime example of this, using a proprietary localdb for notes, inside of app storage you can't access, forcing you to transact with your own data exclusively through the app (and whatever subscriptions or upcharges that come with it). We've trained out the idea that these could just be local text files in a directory you can access and do with what you want.
I've watched discussions around open file formats fade away into obscurity along with the rise of mobile, and now we have to fight on whether we should be so graciously allowed to install software on the devices we own or not.
Not everyone needs to be a computer science student, but some basic level of curiosity or education around how tech works should be required in school, at the very least a warning message of "Your data isn't safe if it's not under your control."
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And yet, it's the generation that struggles the most with managing files on their work laptops and on SMB shares. They know app silos, not file system hierarchy. Ask a teenager where a file is on their phone and the will tell you the name of an app. Ask them how to copy it somewhere else, and they'll use the share sheet and send it to another app. High adoption doesn't equate to high literacy.
> Ask them how to copy it somewhere else To be fair, at least Android and presumably iOS grant apps by default no access to your files in modern versions. The only way to get, e. G., an attachment downloaded via Thunderbird to a PC or another app is the share dialogue. A user does not access to the isolated app storage by default on an unrooted Android phone. For better or worse the young user is actually making the…
That's exactly the point!
The file system is hidden from modern users. Kids brought up on this now have no idea or concept of where their data resides.
There isnt a single identity. Theres a loose federation of databases (banks, CRAs, telecoms, electoral roll, etc.).
There are multiple operational definitions of "name": legal name, common name, known-as name, card name, account display name. None is universally canonical. Theres no statutory hierarchy that forces institutions to agree on precedence.
In the absence of a mandatory national ID, identification relies on matching across name, date of birth, and address history, which are inconsistently collected. Fuzziness is necessary for coverage, but it introduces brittleness. If a variant isnt explicitly linked as an alias, automated online checks can fail because the matching rules dont explore every permutation.
Even within a single dataset the problem doesnt disappear. Large systems such as the NHS have documented identification errors involving patients with identical names, twins at the same address, or demographic overlaps. Unique identifiers help, but operational workflows still depend on humans entering and reconciling imperfect data.
https://digital.nhs.uk/services/personal-demographics-servic...