Live data from Hacker News

Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

queue.acm.org

111–120 of 285 posts

Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

#111
post #2

> And before you ask: Yes, I’m laying this one squarely down before (and partly on the toes of) the tech bros: We could have designed our protocols to be minimally compatible with “a nation of laws,” but the tech bros insisted that compromise was treason, and, as a result, we will lose more privacy than necessary. Ah, the famous “maybe if I take a step back they’ll appreciate it and not push harder”. Or maybe it’s “i…

I also found the compromise bit of the article strange

The minimally compatible is what existed before. The Snowden leaks showed that the Government, and not just the US government, would abuse the shit out of that for mass surveillance.

So now privacy advocates no longer trust that such a compromise can exist

It’s strange that the author both recognizes that the Government broke the social contract and then says privacy advocates should just keep trusting them in the same article

Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

#112

First read of this pissed me off, but subsequent reads gave a much different opinion. Do yourself a favor and read this, a few times, and take a moment to actually try and see what the author's getting at.

I struggle with this because the author is lumping FOSS and "tech bros" together as taking the blame for what a handful of large corporations have done, and thinks that our punishment is what those large corps are lobbying for. It seems like an argument that this is a necessary evil to protect the kids - despite admitting that this is not the real reason for the laws - and then says that those of us who care about privacy are either very rare or "mythical".

Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

#113
post #23

I don't think age restriction will impact FOSS in the long term. If there are some regulations that threaten FOSS now, they are going to be adopted in the long term. Regulations for age restriction are understandable. A lot of modern technology is harming kids (and I don't mean dirty videos, social media seems to be much more harmful). A sensible regulator would leave some responsibility to the parents, but require r…

I think a reasonable way to divide up responsibilities would be identify child-locked devices, not people. It should be trivial for a website to identify a device with a child lock turned on. Then it's up to parents to make sure their kids get a child-locked device. Manufacturers can make it easy to turn on, and society can help by not selling devices to kids without a child lock turned on. It won't work against a de…

This is part of the very sensible Digital Age Assurance Act that is currently the law in California. It prohibits facial recognition, but requires each device to have a child lock. FOSS can implement this no problem.

Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

#114

First read of this pissed me off, but subsequent reads gave a much different opinion. Do yourself a favor and read this, a few times, and take a moment to actually try and see what the author's getting at.

I detest this writing style, where you assert arguments you don't actually believe in and know are in bad faith, in that sniveling "prove me wrong" tone, to provoke some kind of reaction.

Well, mission accomplished, reaction provoked. I'm not going to read this multiple times. I'm going to fire off this comment and remove it from my brain forever.

Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

#115

For those unaware, PHK created (amongst other things) the MD5crypt password hashing algorithm ( $1$… ). It came before bcrypt (1999), scrypt (2009), SHA2crypt (2016), etc , and was committed in 1994: * https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/lib/libcrypt/crypt.c?re... * https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-src/commit/3b2b7f71deba2a... * https://phk.freebsd.dk/sagas/md5crypt/ * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poul-Henning_Ka…

To clarify: not MD5 itself. It was created in 1991 by Ron Rivest. (It is my experience that knowledge of these things isn't as widely distributed as one might hope.)

I first came across it in 1995/1996: Wow, what a magical tool for backend web stuff! I used it for everything.

Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

#116
post #86
post #23

I don't think age restriction will impact FOSS in the long term. If there are some regulations that threaten FOSS now, they are going to be adopted in the long term. Regulations for age restriction are understandable. A lot of modern technology is harming kids (and I don't mean dirty videos, social media seems to be much more harmful). A sensible regulator would leave some responsibility to the parents, but require r…

> A lot of modern technology is harming kids (and I don't mean dirty videos, social media seems to be much more harmful). If that's all we want then that's trivial -- just make certain phones that don't have access to social media, or have whatever limitations enforced. And kids only get those phones. I don't think anybody's addicted to desktop social media. This gets us the privacy and the protection at once.

That's how the California act works, but we lumped it under "age verification" anyway. If you have to select whether the device is for someone over or under 18 in a drop-down menu, apparently that's "age verification"

Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

#117
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not his prediction, he made it clear they are useful. His conclusion for that section is this: > The only real question for me is: Are the LLM-code-review tools economically viable outside the bubble?

So is he suggesting that in the future, models of Opus 4.8 tier will no longer be as affordable? Like it would become 3-5x more expensive? Now that's quite a prediction.

[dead]

Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

#118

This is a very strange read. If that was posted on a random blog, I would have dismissed it. I didn’t know that that cell (anti tech bro, anti big tech, pro age verification laws) in the alignment chart is populated by actual people. And by intelligent people even. Also the fact they call it “age verification” when they clearly build an identity verification and we just accept their language is crazy.

I am anti big tech, that's why I support the California digital age assurance act, it pre-empts things like persona by saying that a simple checkbox is age verification.

Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

#119
post #23

I don't think age restriction will impact FOSS in the long term. If there are some regulations that threaten FOSS now, they are going to be adopted in the long term. Regulations for age restriction are understandable. A lot of modern technology is harming kids (and I don't mean dirty videos, social media seems to be much more harmful). A sensible regulator would leave some responsibility to the parents, but require r…

I think legislation could quite sensibly require OSes and browsers to have easy to enable well-integrated parental controls (which mostly already exists). Browsers could voluntarily send "I'm a child" flag, if you want to make it every website's problem.

But the current legislation is stupid. Treating toddlers like hackers, and forcing every website to deanonymize users. It is so backwards, that it's hard to believe it's not done on purpose as the first step to ban anonymity and strictly control all online access. In the UK of course they're already talking about having a VPN ban, because the hacker toddlers are learning how to mask their IP addresses.

Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

#120
post #106

> Right now, there is a LOT of shrill propaganda from the tech bros, who call themselves “privacy advocates,” about how mandatory age checking is the gateway drug to comprehensive identity checks on the entire Internet, and ridiculing the valid civic concerns governments are trying to address as merely “think of the children” strawman arguments. Oh, it’s not a slippery slope. It’s a single step: age verification IS i…

What is the Digital Age Assurance Act in California? Is it identity verification? If so, how?
Post reply on HN