Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

queue.acm.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 285 posts

Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

#121

Post by inigyou »

close04 wrote: 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…

A working solution can forestall a worse one. Because of the age verification law in California, which is very explicit that you only need a device-wide checkbox, nobody can use the argument that they need a passport scan to comply with the law.

Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

#122

Post by inigyou »

Scaled wrote: post #12
busterarm wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not anti-privacy to point out the obvious that privacy-advocacy is sometimes at odds with governments and the will of voters at large. Privacy is being abused by criminals to victimize people at scale. Just because privacy is a moral good doesn't mean you are morally off the hook for enabling criminals. Governments are so aware of this they're passing sweeping laws against it. This is your new reality -- you can…

Age verification is not the will of the voters. It is the will of large political donors (specifically tech companies and religious censorship groups). It is certainly not the will of adult citizens who use adult websites, who have overwhelming shown in their usage patterns they will abandon any website that tries to do age verification. Parental controls remains the right way to do age gating. It works today and has…

Nobody wants age verification (except Zuck), but most people want children kept away from social media, and nobody's suggested a better option. Why haven't we suggested a better option? Well it's because we called the whole thing authoritarianism and refused to get involved.

You know who didn't refuse to get involved? Larry Ellison, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg. They made suggestions to governments about how to solve this problem, and the best proposed solution was adopted and made the law.

Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

#123

Post by inigyou »

simoncion wrote: post #75
SoftTalker wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parental control does not work today, it's too fragmented and too difficult.

> Parental control does not work today, it's too fragmented and too difficult. Then legally require it to be effective and easy-to-use-if-you-take-a-few-minutes-to-read-the-instructions. See also [0]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48911863 >

This is literally what California did with the Digital Age Assurance Act, AB1043.

Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

#124

Post by inigyou »

failuser wrote: post #24
busterarm wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The laws not stopping the criminals isn't the point. People are calling on their governments to do something and thus governments are going to do what they are going to do. It's a mix of what they can do and what they're likely to do. They just have to be able to go back to voters and say they're doing something. If you think that the fact that they did the wrong thing is an argument for not doing anything, you clear…

Governments can make effective laws, you know. There are tools that can solve this. Parental controls, separation of peer-to-peer communications from algorithmic feeds. The lawmakers are old, tech-illiterate people. You can tell them that a private Minecraft server is illegal and they will believe it.

It's a shame that non-evil tech-literate people refused to talk to lawmakers about any of this.

Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

#125

Post by MetaWhirledPeas »

I had to stop reading halfway through to respond.

> In comparison, tech sisters advocating for an absolute right to privacy seem to be a very rare, and maybe mythical, species.

Ever heard of Meredith Whittaker?

> 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.

This has to be a joke. There's private, and there's not private. There is nothing in between. This is not about tech bros. This is about guiding principles, about personal liberty, and about freedom from tyranny.

> It may not quite be a law of nature, but my personal guess is that the opportunities for anonymity on the Internet will shrink until mothers no longer are forced to have “the talk” when their daughters get their first mobile phone.

In addition to "the talk" guess what else they won't be forced (or allowed) to talk about? Political dissent.

This chunk of the article is both sexist and defeatist. Now to read the rest.

Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

#126

Post by close04 »

skybrian wrote: post #108
andix wrote: 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…

What disconnects this discussion from reality, and maybe causes questions like “why don’t they just do it this way”, is the assumption that this is really only or even mainly about age verification and “protecting the children”.

The reason it’s not done “this way” or “that way” even when those are objectively better ways to achieve the stated goal, but rather in an unexplainable way broader way is because the goal is broader that that and age verification is just the tip of the spear. The rest of it is laying the groundwork for a framework to control the freedom on the internet by linking identity to speech and action.

Look at what solution is implemented to decide what problem is it supposed to fix, otherwise you’re just looking at the smoke and mirrors.

Not that every state and country is on board with this, but it’s getting a lot harder to maintain the pressure to keep these initiatives down. Every time they get pushed one step forward it’s that much harder to regain that ground.

Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

#127

Post by inigyou »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #65
busterarm wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not anti-privacy to point out the obvious that privacy-advocacy is sometimes at odds with governments and the will of voters at large. Privacy is being abused by criminals to victimize people at scale. Just because privacy is a moral good doesn't mean you are morally off the hook for enabling criminals. Governments are so aware of this they're passing sweeping laws against it. This is your new reality -- you can…

> Privacy is being abused by criminals to victimize people at scale. Almost all victimization is being done without end to end encryption. This is not a problem caused by privacy.

Yep. For example on Instagram DMs, which is why Instagram abolished E2EE, and we all went into an uproar.

Also on Discord and Roblox, they are apparently the biggest platforms for this, but they're not E2EE anyway, they're just hiding it because their executives like what's happening.

Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

#128

Post by mejutoco »

saghm wrote: post #50
mejutoco wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even in the offline world that is not the case. Ex. Alkohol sales

You don't need to show your ID to go into the store and buy something else though, so why would this provide any sort of precedent for "you can't use the internet for literally anything on this device without proving your age"?

I was responding to this quote only

> why can't we just leave all responsibility to the parents? In our experience in the offline world it seems this applies!

Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

#129

Post by inigyou »

close04 wrote: post #20
busterarm wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not anti-privacy to point out the obvious that privacy-advocacy is sometimes at odds with governments and the will of voters at large. Privacy is being abused by criminals to victimize people at scale. Just because privacy is a moral good doesn't mean you are morally off the hook for enabling criminals. Governments are so aware of this they're passing sweeping laws against it. This is your new reality -- you can…

The guy’s logic is “if only we had allowed a small backdoor from the start they wouldn’t be forced to install a large backdoor now”. Other technologies that were open to the law were endlessly abused for surveillance. His theory is bunk, there is absolutely no middle ground to be had with the people who want a backdoor. There are no small backdoors.

What do you consider a backdoor though? Saying that devices must have parental controls isn't a backdoor. Saying that devices must scan your ID is a backdoor to break anonymity, but is he saying that?

If we had parental controls that actually worked it would forestall any talk about ID scanning because parents could just enable parental controls.

Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

#130

Post by bothers »

delusional wrote: post #39
ai_critic wrote: post #35

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.

And please remember that Poul-Henning is an old-hat and well respected in the field, he's also not a product of American culture. Consider that he might have some useful insight that covers some blindspots your particular culture might not.

The relevant field is politics, not CS.
Post reply on HN