421–430 of 655 posts
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And yet as the article mentioned, the "problem" is a lie... an excuse to justify the surveillance state.
I think the lie is to look at the problems we have that the internet has enabled and say "things are ok as they are don't try to do anything to solve it."
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My parents always kept a few bottles of wine in a cabinet in the living room. If 8 year old me wanted wine, I could have drunk a whole bottle while they were away and there was no way they could have stopped me. Yet I didn't drink my parents' wine, nor did I grow up alcoholic.
Kudos for resisting alcohol as an eight year old. How does that apply to all the kiddos whose lives are impacted by social media? Kind of a "them problem"?
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How do you define remote privacy? Beyond a few decades ago I could use a phone booth and pay in coins.
And any phone could be tapped with a signature by a judge.
The difference is that one is very granular and done in reaction to a crime. The other is a wide scale collection of data which is necessary recorded.
I’m glad this is finally becoming the cause célèbre du jour. This feels like THE FIGHT or at least one of the TOP 3 THE FIGHTS and it hasn’t had even a fraction of the public’s attention until now.
Do you think that this will lead to a new version of a alternative "internet" where people try to avoid the government control? And is that even possible? Or will we all just comply?
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The article talks about the possibilities of malicious cloning of these tokens by third parties, but fails to identify the much more common use case, and one that makes this scheme useless for age verification. It's one thing to be concerned about someone stealing my credential, but another to prevent the transfer of these credentials, especially if they are limited use credentials. The entire point of age verificati…
> The highest friction version of this is that the credential ties to a real world identity somehow; maybe locked behind legal barriers, etc., but if a minor is caught using someone's credential, then the person whose credential they are using can be investigated, and, if necessary, charged with a crime roughly equivalent to providing alcohol to a minor. Without the possibility of real world enforcement, none of thes…
In most countries it's perfectly legal to provide alcohol to your kids.
I am always surprised that people get shocked when online privacy is put at risk, as if it was a fundamental human right. REMOTE PRIVACY NEVER EXISTED BEFORE A FEW DECADES AGO! And what happened in these decades are enough for the societies to wonder whether this new possibility in human connections (i.e. remote privacy) is globally a good thing. Just stomping your feet because the new toy may be declared illegal is…
You see, when the governments are outraged that they can't monitor all facets of communication or are disallowed from using their shiny new ways to automatically observe and categorize billions of datapoints to automatically surveil-by-default millions of people, that is called having serious doubts and grave concerns, very important stuff. When the people are outraged that a freedom they've enjoyed for several decad…
And now, general public is pissed about consequences of what large companies caused so much, that it is willing to put a lot of power into the hand of evil government, because they see it as less evil.
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> You aren't required to identify yourself to get a phone. You can get a prepaid phone with no ID. Requiring ID to buy a prepaid SIM card has become the norm across the developed world. There are still a few holdout countries, but they won’t hold out for long.
You say that as though it's a feature rather than a bug. Being able to have an anonymous SIM card is a useful privacy and security feature, to avoid things like "tell me the ID of everyone in the vicinity of this protest". (And that's one reason governments try to break that.)
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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…
> They become a traceable identity token Not if you use a challenge-response protocol where the client returns a zero-knowledge proof of age, where the proof incorporates a random string sent by the website. The traceable stuff is private information that the website never sees. If a minor is caught with it, then law enforcement has local access to the minor's hardware and can probably view the private data. At that…
Obviously it does. These $1 per-day apps are 24/7 online and so challenges can simply be proxied just the same as tokens.
> ... law enforcement has local access to the minor's hardware ...
This is a large part of what people, in practice, want to prevent using this scheme.
> Once you've been revoked, you have to go through the hassle of setting this all up again, which might be enough incentive to keep it reasonably secure ...
States want to know who to punish when this happens. Which also details how this is defeated: you can't revoke the token, because that makes getting a conviction near-impossible and it exposes the states to counterclaims.
The people who install such forwarding apps don't have money for the court to charge, and they can't take away their identification apps (which these will be, obviously) because that's the cheapest way for states to communicate with them.
Unless you build this into the base layer of the internet (which European networks like minitel did, by the way, with France telecom graciously checking it for free. Free for the state, of course. YOU paid per packet)
> ... to keep it reasonably secure ...
Oh and "reasonably secure" won't cut it. Someone committed suicide after a message was posted, and they're "reasonably secure" who it came from? You see the problem, I hope.
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…