Earlier quoted context omitted.
The people proposing these laws presumably think imperfect enforcement is better than no enforcement at all. In the non-zero-knowledge case, it's possible to revoke falsely shared credentials.
> In the non-zero-knowledge case, it's possible to revoke falsely shared credentials. In a true zero-knowledge system sharing falsely shared credentials becomes easy because it’s untraceable. If the proof has no knowledge attached, you can’t conclude who used their credentials on a website that generates proof-of-age tokens on demand for visitors.
Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act
341–350 of 1001 posts
Re: Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act
#342Earlier quoted context omitted.
Scott Alexander had a few posts about that ("why is there so little money in politics?"): https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/tech-pacs-are-closing-in-on...
I think one of the reasons politicians can be bought so cheaply by interest groups is that the opponents of the interests groups have practically no money. The interest groups don't need to spend a ton as long as they spend more than their opponents. The linked post talks about the effectiveness of AIPAC but fails to mention how much is spent by say, Palestinian interest groups. Perhaps there's a good reason for this…
Re: Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act
#343What I'm confused about is how the proposed bills would apply to servers. Like, in general, a software change to add an "age class" attribute to user accounts and a syscall "what's this attribute for the current user account" would satisfy the California bill and that's a relatively minor change (the bad part is the NY bill that allegedly requires technical verification of whatever the user claimed). The weird issue…
We're all going to have to use service accounts created on Windows Server 2003 or RHEL 4, otherwise they won't be old enough and will require manual login from an of-age administrator
The auth server would lie in Colorado. The FS server, in New Mexico. The CPU server, in Nevada. The terminal (the client), in Alaska. Shut down and repeat at random. Watch the lobbies collapsing down tring to sue that monster.
Re: Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act
#344Age verification is merely the background task to set up infrastructure for OS to provide many many other signals about who's using the device. Age signals from the OS? Need to provide a channel of information available to applications. Applications already talk to servers with unchecked commonality. Biometric data? Today it unlocks your private key. Tomorrow it's used to verify you are the same person that was used…
Not just governments, though. I've wondered if FaceID and the Android counterpart are actively creating an extraordinary labeled dataset for facial expressions at the point of sale. With users trained to scan their face before every transaction, tech companies could correlate transactions to facial expressions, facial expressions to emotions, and emotions to device content. I can imagine algorithms that subtly curate…
Also keep in mind keystroke dynamics can probably do that too and has been a topic of study in one form or another since the nineteenth century vis-a-vis telegraph operators.
Re: Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act
#345Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which is strange, because it is widely known a large amount of their advertising revenue comes from fake accounts.
This doesn’t make sense, how do these fake accounts bring revenue ? I thought the end goal is to improve conversion rate by removing the “bots” and this would therefore lead to higher ad spend and more money to Facebook direct
Re: Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act
#346Does this surprise anyone, just over a decade ago there was a whistleblower who said the government was spying on its own citizens. The president and half the country called him a traitor. The only way to stop this from happening is half the country refuse to buy any tech that implements OS age verification. That includes working any job that also requires the use of that tech(Basically all jobs). The only thing that…
You have consumer activist brain. Next you're going to suggest that we complain to the manager or start our own government and compete in the marketplace.
> The only thing that talks is money
No, the only thing that is talking is money. Money wants this. You're busy pretending like you're going to do a boycott; they're going to boycott you.
Complain about the internet? They'll just blacklist you from it. Complain about the phone? Well now you can't use one; try smoke signals. Complain about the landlord? They'll settle the case, kick you out on the street, and blacklist you among all private equity landlords and the management companies that service small landlords. You'll just go to a small landlord that doesn't use one of the management companies? Well they won't have access to a bunch of vendors that have exclusive contracts with and share ownership with the management companies; now they can't make any money and have to sell to private equity.
You've been fooled into thinking that being victimized is a moral failure of the victim. The perpetrators taught you that. They taught you that the only appropriate action is to beg and threaten to leave, and they shut down customer service and monopolized the market. But, again, the worst thing they trained you to do is to blame the victim.
Re: Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act
#347Earlier quoted context omitted.
The steelman argument is that parents are not necessarily up to date on the technology, and cannot reasonably be expected to supervise teenagers 24/7 up to the age of 18. Compare movie ratings or alcohol laws, for example: there's a non-parental obligation on third parties not to provide alcohol to children or let them in to R18 showings. But the implementation matters, and almost all of these bills internationally a…
In the UK parents can give children alcohol below the age of 18. parents get to make the final decision at home so I do not think its really comparable. I would personally favour allowing parents to buy drinks for children below the current limits (18 without a meal, 16 for wine, beer and cider with a meal). The alternative to this is empowering parents by regulating SIM cards (child safe cards already exist) and all…
It is not a new or novel concept. There are legal adults taking part in these conversations that are simply too young to have ever experienced internet connections that weren't restricted and filtered mandated by legislation, and they would have been teenagers that were old enough to have a say in the conversation when the Conservatives were debating the OSA in parliament.
Mobile internet connections have been filtered since 2004 even, so it's entirely likely that this would also be true for some people that are pushing 30 today. The debate on whether it's appropriate for internet filters to block access to Childline, the NSPCC, the Police, the BBC, Parliament, etc, is 15 years old at this point. Fifteen.
The false dichotomy that exists between the entirely authoritarian measures of the OSA and the still fairly authoritarian measures of mandatory filtering serves only the interests of borderline monopolistic American tech companies who are in a position to weather such regulations as they stifle and snuff out any possibility of a less harmful web ecosystem, and people will cheer it on as they believe the social media platforms they blame for causing harm will themselves be harmed by the very laws they are writing.
The real alternative is not having mandatory filtering but instead voluntary filtering by the parents themselves, which is what everybody seems to think they are arguing for, and that conversation is long since dead. It is entirely beside the point, but contrast it with alcohol laws. The UK is one of the few countries in Europe that has consumption laws both in private(+) and in public, whereas half of Europe only has consumption laws in public while the other half has no consumption laws in either private or public. America on the other hand has many states that prohibit under-21s from drinking alcohol even in private. A better comparison may be content ratings, which are largely entirely voluntary and not a legal requirement.
(+) It's 5+ so there may as well be no laws on private consumption.
Re: Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act
#348Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think one of the reasons politicians can be bought so cheaply by interest groups is that the opponents of the interests groups have practically no money. The interest groups don't need to spend a ton as long as they spend more than their opponents. The linked post talks about the effectiveness of AIPAC but fails to mention how much is spent by say, Palestinian interest groups. Perhaps there's a good reason for this…
We should really come up with a system where the entire population chips in a little bit of money and we hire some lobbyists to represent us.
They may on paper, but of course a lot of money goes to dividing us up come election time. What you are suggesting is no shortcut - it would rather be almost like inventing an alternative political party.
Re: Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act
#349Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even with ZKP this is still highly problematic, it create difficulty for undocumented people to access the web, create ton of phishing opportunity, reinforce censorship on most site (as they will now all need to be minor compliant or need age verification), reinforce the chilling effect and make the web even less crawlable/archivable (or you need to give a valid citizen ID to your crawler/archiver). With no proof it…
>it create difficulty for undocumented people to access the web Why is this such a sticking point in US politics? If the "undocumented" people aren't supposed to be in the country in the first place, why should rest of society cater to them? Even if you're against age verification for other reasons, dragging in the immigration angle is just going to alienate the other half of the population who don't share your view…
Because these undocumented people are still humans. They deserve access to information services. It's as simple as that.
Re: Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act
#350Have at it Meta, you broke it you most certainly bought it!