231–240 of 520 posts
This idea sounds like the death of social media. Remove anyone under 18 ensures they won't signup after. Forcing id verification means 70-80% of adult accounts will be dead. Network effects disappear. Those who remain will be businesses pushing something, hackers/spammers and some die hard group.
> "Age verification" means that everyone who does anything online will have to submit to fine-grained tracking and recording of all their online activities. its been said 1000 times here, but: age verification doesn't have to be a nightmare dystopia of 24/7 fine-grained tracking and recording unless you are somehow hoping to achieve 100% success rate (something we have not done with any other law ever). there are sev…
I have a feeling my definition of having my toes stepped on differs dramatically from yours.
> i am convinced that enough people in power know it, too, but see this as their chance to get the full-dystopia version rolled out.
Well there's plenty of idiots in power and I'm sure they have no idea. But there absolutely are evil ones who simply want more power and don't care what happens after they have it.
If this were actually about protecting children, maybe you could get something passed that wasn't just ground work for a panopticon hellscape. But it's not about children at all - the people truly worried about that are just useful idiots - it's about power, and so you can't pass anything without having the surveillance infrastructure forced in.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
...and? Just like a child can "trivially" ask an adult to buy them a beer. Who are these adults giving children their verification codes for adult websites?
Asking adults for beer doesn't scale, code sharing can. If you want to crack down on code sharing, you'd have to start surveilling who is signing up to what.
>>If you want to crack down on code sharing
Right now, all the kid has to do is grab their parents passport while they are not home or asleep, scan it on their phone and they are in. It takes 30 seconds.
With the codes they would either need to convince their parents to generate a code for them, or find someone online who will - which of these solutions seems less prone to abuse to you?
Again, let's not let perfect be the enemy of the good.
If we unified and refused, it wouldn't happen. It couldn't happen. I am begging my fellow developers in this space to remember that you are WORKERS. The owning class will throw you into the meat grinder with every other worker the second it's convenient to their wealth extraction.
Throw down your tools and say no.
If you find yourself tasked with implementing age verification shit you think is profoundly unethical, don't build it.
If you find yourself building products you know to be harmful, refuse.
If you find yourself put against a wall to ship garbage you know doesn't work to check boxes for some fucking CEO, stop.
We are the tip of the spear in the global effort to make the world more surveilled, more dangerous, less free, and more expensive. We have a CHOICE and we have to start making it.
And yes, it may cost you your job. It'll certainly cost you status. Your boss will hate you. But the last year or so has made it abundantly clear that whatever professional "safety" we feel is not warranted. We are just as replaceable as the delivery drivers who get caught pissing in bottles.
I grew up during the 90s/2000s and I used the internet, first social media platforms, messengers, etc. – a lot. My parents had no idea of computers, how to use them, how to use the internet, what is out there etc. Yet I am convinced that the way my parents dealt with it is still the gold standard. Their parenting equipped me well to deal with weird, dangerous or otherwise harmful things I encountered. They were the k…
I don't know that universal tracking is the answer. I also don't think unrestricted access to children by manipulative predators (companies in this case) is the right answer. But then, I don't think they should have unrestricted access to adults either.
I grew up during the 90s/2000s and I used the internet, first social media platforms, messengers, etc. – a lot. My parents had no idea of computers, how to use them, how to use the internet, what is out there etc. Yet I am convinced that the way my parents dealt with it is still the gold standard. Their parenting equipped me well to deal with weird, dangerous or otherwise harmful things I encountered. They were the k…
Maybe our children will figure it out as they become parents. I hope so.
I'm just gonna say here that all of this, whatever solution whatever unaccountable political group decides is the one, can only be built by tech workers. All of these require fingers hitting keys to produce code to function. If we unified and refused, it wouldn't happen. It couldn't happen. I am begging my fellow developers in this space to remember that you are WORKERS. The owning class will throw you into the meat…
That's cute. About half my coworkers are socialists and the other half fire breathing MAGA. The only thing we have united on was that we don't talk politics at work. But I assure you, there is not universal agreement at all that authoritarian technology is bad. Some people, including many developers, absolutely support it.
What you propose requires agreeing on the definition of harmful. And immediately it fails.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In practice this means no rooted/jailbroken phones. Personally - this is less acceptable to me than just having the site collect my image/id. I'd support just putting the id in a dedicated device (ex - gov issues smart key) or just accepting that sometimes people will share id info (just like... physical ids). It doesn't even close all the doors to transferring ids - since I can still just hand someone a phone (jus…
If you use physical ids to verify your identity, they normally verify that your face matches the image on the id, no? That’s not possible for web id.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/doppelgangers-dont...
> "Age verification" means that everyone who does anything online will have to submit to fine-grained tracking and recording of all their online activities. its been said 1000 times here, but: age verification doesn't have to be a nightmare dystopia of 24/7 fine-grained tracking and recording unless you are somehow hoping to achieve 100% success rate (something we have not done with any other law ever). there are sev…
Could you be more specific as to what you're imagining? I don't personally see a way to verify someone's age which doesn't involve either credit card verification, photo id verification, or some sort of facial recognition. If you know enough about someone to verify their age—even to a relatively low degree of accuracy—you probably know enough to pinpoint who they are in general. Heck—in most cases, we can't even tell…
Website you want to visit generates a one-time private/public key for the purpose of this login attempt, hashes your random number, and sends the hash back to you.
You connect to the government auth platform, auth yourself to your government, and ask them to sign the hash you received.
You pass the signed hash as well as the original random number to the website you wanted to access (the original random number is used by the website to store the one-time key they generated for you). They can see it is signed by the government. They can see it is made with the hash they provided.
You get access to whatever content you wanted. The website doesn't know who you are. The government doesn't know where you logged in. Sure, it won't hold up against collusion between website and government, but nothing would.
the principles explained above are slight adaptations of PKCE authentication.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So now I have to have a mobile phone?
Could probably be implemented by a smartcard or yubikey-like device as well. Shoot, just build it into my state issued ID card.
And now you're going to tell every state to do it again, but this time it's got a chip in it so "just trust the government, man".
This will go well.