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Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech

nonogra.ph

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Re: Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech

#281

Post by Ouman »

onion2k wrote: post #10

If we taught systems thinking in schools things like internet age verification would never get past being an idea on the back of a napkin. People struggle to consider the second-, third-, and nth-order effects of anything so asking them to consider what else might happen if we bring in laws and technical mechanisms to 'protect the children' is unfortunately too a big leap for a lot of them. Most people are bad at spo…

A lot of bad tech policy seems to come from judging a proposal only by its stated intent

Re: Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech

#282

Post by ben_w »

teiferer wrote: post #242
chii wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stupid things like brexit was put to a vote, but really important things such as age verification and mass surveillance are never put to any vote.

In what way was Brexit a stupid thing? It was an extemely important decision, directly affecting everybody's life. If asking people about anything then isn't that what it should be? You might not like the outcome (I don't) but I consider the question of Brexit important.

Analogy:

Cancer surgery is an extremely important decision, directly affecting many people's lives.

What happened with Brexit was a analogous a bunch of salesmen on TV saying "that mysterious ache you have, don't listen to doctors who say it's fine, call our surgical team today! It's cancer! We can fix this quickly and you'll be back to your old self within a week!" for two decades, then the country agreeing, going to surgery, and waking up to find they'd had half their liver removed, the post-surgical biopsy results said it was fine and not cancerous at all, it took 6 months to recover and they could never drink alcohol again. And the ache was still there.

If it had been an honest "we know it will cost X, we are willing to spend this because otherwise what is the point of money", that would have been totally fair.

Instead, problems that weren't caused by the EU were blamed on it for decades, while the benefits of membership were treated as the natural state of the world to the extent that talk of losing them was equated with "being punished".

Re: Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech

#283

Post by AnthonyMouse »

lelandbatey wrote: post #179
friendzis wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you think about it, the idea of a representative democracy is rooted in the technical difficulties of implementing a direct democracy: both spread of information/discussion to the masses and organizing the votes. In this day and age, probably with a relatively tiny investment into public access points, we could very reasonably have a technically functional direct democracy. The legislative cycle is already authe…

Is there such a thing as "unbiased public opinion" at all though? The memetic effects of language and communication means propaganda and similar tools of rhetoric and leveraged communication will always work, with or without an internet. There's no "solution", only "good enoughs". Direct democracy is cool, but also impractical. I do not want to vote on every counties appropriations for road maintenance. So what's a l…

> I do not want to vote on every counties appropriations for road maintenance.

The best way to do this is through a combination of subsidiarity and constitutional rights.

You have a central government but its primary purpose is to set out and uphold fundamental rights. It essentially sets out what the local governments can't do, so you can't have ex post facto laws, censor speech, detain people without trial, try to enforce local laws on actions performed in remote jurisdictions, etc.

In particular, the central government should not be in the business of regulating private conduct. Only the local governments do that.

Then you don't have to be worried about appropriations for road maintenance in some other county because you don't live there. Whereas the appropriations in your county are coming out of your pocket, and aren't such a far away thing that your vote is being diluted into irrelevance, so then maybe you want to be paying some attention to that.

Re: Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech

#284

Post by jonathanstrange »

stymaar wrote: post #258
usrnm wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is the scale and centralization of information. Let's imagine that every bar has to not only check the id of every customer but do it automatically: every time you enter a bar anywhere in the country you must have your id scanned by a government-issued system. Are you still ok with it?

That's why we need privacy preserving designs. But saying “we must abandon the idea of age verification in bar” is never going to work in any democratic setting. Voters genuinely want to protect the children, without second thoughts.

Why do parental software / settings and filters not work? Aren't there even approaches based on whitelisting?

Re: Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech

#285

Post by Ouman »

roenxi wrote: post #29
onion2k wrote: post #10

If we taught systems thinking in schools things like internet age verification would never get past being an idea on the back of a napkin. People struggle to consider the second-, third-, and nth-order effects of anything so asking them to consider what else might happen if we bring in laws and technical mechanisms to 'protect the children' is unfortunately too a big leap for a lot of them. Most people are bad at spo…

In fairness, the evidence is that people already pretty firmly against things like chat control and the will to push it through tends to come from the political circles more than popular belief it is a good idea. I expect that if the measure itself went to a general vote, the majority would be against it once they have to deal with a specific proposal. It takes repeated pushes by the authoritarians looking for an opp…

I agree that it is not always mass public demand for authoritarianism. Often it is more like institutional persistence plus vague moral framing

Re: Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech

#286

Post by rockskon »

fyredge wrote: post #227
rockskon wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The social media you don't want will continue to scale.

Right, and therefore we regulate them

And what sort of regulations did you have in mind that don't primarily punish the users?

Re: Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech

#287

Post by M95D »

Klonoar wrote: post #194
shevy-java wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> making sure you're using an unmodified government approved operating system Will be interesting to see if this leads to more Linux systems being deployed. Then again with systemd supporting age sniffing ( https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40954 ), evading this becomes harder and harder.

Systemd changes don’t make it harder, you control the damn OS at the source code level if you choose.

Theoretically, yes, but Gentoo with all their resources couldn't keep even eudev alive. How much free time does one person need to maintain a fork of the entire systemd?

Re: Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech

#289

Post by Ouman »

friendzis wrote: post #166
roenxi wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fairness, the evidence is that people already pretty firmly against things like chat control and the will to push it through tends to come from the political circles more than popular belief it is a good idea. I expect that if the measure itself went to a general vote, the majority would be against it once they have to deal with a specific proposal. It takes repeated pushes by the authoritarians looking for an opp…

When you think about it, the idea of a representative democracy is rooted in the technical difficulties of implementing a direct democracy: both spread of information/discussion to the masses and organizing the votes. In this day and age, probably with a relatively tiny investment into public access points, we could very reasonably have a technically functional direct democracy. The legislative cycle is already authe…

I am not sure the hard part of direct democracy was ever only the logistics of voting

Re: Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech

#290

Post by stymaar »

nly wrote: post #264
stymaar wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof

Yeah...I'm fully aware what a ZKP is..you're just missing the point.

Why did you write that then:

> You then still need a trusted ID service or algorithm to capture an image of the user _at the time of use_ to compare that to.

> Just having access to your digital ID credentials proves nothing

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