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The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy

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Re: The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy

#211

Post by wolvoleo »

hacker_homie wrote: post #196
Aurornis wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this is the part of the issue that is so frequently ignored: Anonymous age verification schemes are easily defeated through proxying because there wouldn't be any consequences for selling your tokens. "Install this app on your phone and we'll pay you $1 per day" and it will mint your anonymous identity tokens and send them off to kids who want to buy them. If there's no way to track the tokens, there is no possi…

I thought a solution to this would be to use a physical smartcard to store the certificate(perhaps on your government ID). if the protocol is a challenge/response and the private key never leaves the card it would make proxying without the physical card more difficult.

Yeah great idea, having to get out your government ID every time you want to use a website.

Re: The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy

#212

Post by coldtea »

j2kun wrote: post #21

There are at least some technological solutions here, such as anonymous credentials. [1] Modern versions of this technique allow one to associate metadata (like a proof of age exceeding a threshold) in such a way that the verifier can't even correlate repeated requests across users. Governments that are serious about age verification and individual privacy (which, doubtful they truly are) should agree on a protocol a…

>There are at least some technological solutions here, such as anonymous credentials.

Technological solutions for what problem?

Re: The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy

#213

Post by HerbManic »

AJRF wrote: post #56

The path ahead in the next few years (at least for the UK) 1. Age gating + VPN ban under the guise of protecting children from social media 2. Few years pass, Identity Passport gets ushered in under guise of convenience of not having to repeat those pesky age verification checks. 3. Utilities start to require ID Passport. Including signing up with an ISP. 4. Renting starts to require ID Passport. 5. Work requires ID…

Here in Australia we already have the first part of 1 then most of 3,4,5. We are almost there. And you thought our wildlife was the torment nexus.

Re: The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy

#214

Post by ares623 »

The internet will just stop being the "cool place". Young people will need to find some other avenue or medium to congregate away from their nannies' watchful eyes. That has been the one constant across the multiple technological revolutions we've had in the last few decades, younger generations looking for a place to call their own. Meta, etc. obviously know this, hence the "metaverse" and AI slop. But what they refuse to believe is that it can't be manufactured and forced top-down, it needs to be bottom-up.

Re: The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy

#215

Post by 999900000999 »

kulahan wrote: post #189
999900000999 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parents taking responsibility for their kids. I grew up in a neighborhood full of drug dealers. Street sellers, not the classy Walter White kind. Ironically being on a computer all day kept me out of trouble. But with these laws in place I guess you might as well start doing stupid ish in real life.

I'm glad computers came in and saved you from your otherwise-inevitable life of cartel involvement, but I don't see what this has to do with the en-masse mental poisoning of children? I'm not even talking about politics yet. Cyber-bullying is insane . Either way, I genuinely don't believe "let's just hope parents... start doing better?" is a solution.

Parents do need to do better.

Work on building self confidence.

My family relentlessly called me stupid and lazy to the point where a cyberbully would of been an upgrade.

You can always turn your phone off.

A lot of God awful parents treat their kids like trash and blame everyone else when Timmy doesn't get into Harvard.

Of all the people I've met with rough upbringings not a single one blamed anything outside of bad parenting.

Being a parent ( especially a step parent) is extremely hard.

100 years ago bad parents blamed dime novels.

50 years ago it was rock music.

Re: The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy

#216

Post by [deleted] »

teravor wrote: post #135
rockskon wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait - so you're advocating for use of a persistent identifier tied to a person? How is that any different than what advertising networks do right now beyond giving them additional guaranteed information of your age bracket? To clarify - it's not cryptographically necessary to present the same token for each and every transaction and serves to categorically defeat the entire privacy guarantee of ZKP. It also makes it…

> use of a persistent identifier at the terminus, yes. there is no other way to avoid the homeless problem you listed. by terminus I am referring to where a central authority vouches for unforgability. this does not mean advertisers will have a token they can use (see remote attestation infrastructure). > tied to a person whether or not the terminus can tie a token to a real world identity will depend on how careless…

[deleted]

Re: The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy

#217

Post by rockskon »

teravor wrote: post #198
rockskon wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> at the terminus, yes. there is no other way to avoid the homeless problem you listed. by terminus I am referring to where a central authority vouches for unforgability. this does not mean advertisers will have a token they can use (see remote attestation infrastructure). Where to even begin here.... To generate the token, it needs to be based on specific data. How do you prevent people from generating tokens based…

> Look - I know you mean well, but it is clear from this discussion you aren't familiar with cryptography, system security guarantees, Internet infrastructure scaling, or what would be needed to introduce new descriptive information about a person on the Internet and not have it become a new privacy risk. it's actually clear that you are the one who isn't familiar with this, I referenced remote attestation which you…

> it's actually clear that you are the one who isn't familiar with this, I referenced remote attestation which you appear to know little about as it addresses the problem of identifying information (the service has no way to link tokens across without help from the CA).

You've promoted mutually exclusive concepts with regards to cryptography which is why I said you don't seem to understand it. And again - and again and again and again and again and again - what is the additional information you are authenticating based off of beyond age? Remote attestation provides absolutely zero privacy utility here whatsoever on its own! So you've remotely attested this ZKP key represents a person who is an adult. Creating another key based on that information alone is trivial to spoof - for it not to be trivial, it would require validating additional information!

What is your root of trust? What is the basis by which age is verified in a way that can't readily be spoofed?

> you also don't appear to know what a nullifier is, in a ZKP system you submit identifying information and a hash of a secret string. the CA adds the hash to a public database and in the future you prove you one of the members of the database with a nullifier - the anonymity-set is everyone in the database who entered it prior to your submission. this can also be done with a blind signature to the same effect.

That's nice and all for trivia on ZKP but how does that touch upon the problem being discussed?

The mechanics of ZKP are not relevant to the problem of ZKP being categorically worthless for the problem at hand. I don't say ZKP is worthless out of ignorance - more discussions about it won't change that.

The specifics of ZKP do not change the fact that you are validating either too little information to be useful for preventing fraud or too much to have privacy-preserving value.

> there is no further point to this discussion.

Evidently not.

We can't solve private age verification with blockchain tech. I'm happy you're so passionate about it, but it isn't a silver bullet.

Re: The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy

#218

Post by HerbManic »

yoz-y wrote: post #172
zaptheimpaler wrote: post #59

This seems more like a technical problem that we could actually solve well if we wanted to and had competent people advising the governments. You go to DMV and they generate a keypair and an entry in a DB. App looks up your age with your public key + signed private key authorization from you. Apps can ask for specific checks like is_over_21, is_citizen or whatever without any more data. Something like that, details a…

None of this is necessary. First, the only devices that actually need to be gated are cell phones. The user agent should simply send the user’s age of the parental lock is set up and the websites required to respect this. Parental controls and the OS should be robust enough to not let kids bypass it (e.g.: by installing a browser that skips the header, or blocking proxy websites) Done. Cellphones only because those a…

Never underestimate the resolve of a teenager who is being kept from something they want. And once they solve it, they will spread the word for clout.

Re: The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy

#219

Post by simpaticoder »

derwiki wrote: post #184
simpaticoder wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, like how we don't have pay phones any more because they were made illegal.

I saw a working payphone at Pinecrest Lake a month ago. Presuming you didn’t literally mean illegal, what did you mean?

You don't need to make libraries illegal to get rid of them, you just need to undermine their value and they'll be defunded and disappear. No passing laws necessary, just pubic ambivalence.

Re: The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy

#220

Post by verdverm »

lovich wrote: post #209
verdverm wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

we can design better online spaces, the incentives are not currently aligned

And I _can_ climb to the top of Mount Everest theoretically but it’s highly unlikely given the real world constraints. I’d prefer a pragmatic solution and there is no pragmatic solution that gives us privacy back given the government and megacorps ability to pierce the vast majority of forms of privacy. The only thing anonymous speech is getting us currently is being manipulated by bad actors who are lying about thei…

So much bad speech / misinformation is not anonymous, look at the kind of stuff the US President, Admin, and Gov't are proud posting, or the left/right-wing influencers. Forcing "papers please" on everyone is not going to meaningfully change the situation (imo). It will give the autocrats an inch and then they will take more. Eventually they will be able to police online speech.

---

From: On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder, Chapter 1 title & intro

Do not obey in advance.

Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.

https://ia801505.us.archive.org/11/items/on-tyranny-twenty-l...

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