Live data from Hacker News

EU Age Verification Project Mandates Hardware-Bound Attestation

linuxiac.com

21–30 of 206 posts

Re: EU Age Verification Project Mandates Hardware-Bound Attestation

#21
post #17
post #4

I don't understand where the all the EU anti-trust and anti-corruption regulators are here. _Governments_ enforcing that you have a Google or Apple account to participate in society is transparently absurd. This isn't only a digital sovereignty issue, it's also an anti-competition issue.

The reality of the matter is that it is virtually impossible for Europe to even begin to displace Apple or Google devices, and especially not operating systems and all the ecosystem that goes along with it. The EU politicians are just publicly paying lip-service to "digital sovereignty" while they quietly hope this all just blows over when Trump is gone in 2 years.

> it is virtually impossible for Europe to even begin to displace Apple or Google devices

It's hard for sure but they are not even trying, the non-duopoly alternatives are run by hobbyists in their free time and just get shit on by EU bureaucrats

Re: EU Age Verification Project Mandates Hardware-Bound Attestation

#22
> Linux is not explicitly banned. Desktop Linux users could access a website and scan a QR code using a supported mobile wallet.

Considering a significant part of the internet will be behind age verification gates, how are they imagining this to work? I should pull out my iPhone or Google Android phone and get its approval every time I want to visit a website?

Re: EU Age Verification Project Mandates Hardware-Bound Attestation

#24
post #18

All this ostensibly to keep teenage boys from watching Pornhub (when parental controls already exist). The real reason, of course, is to force people to connect strong real-life identifiers to online activity. Mobile first, then Windows. Then Linux is too weak to oppose on its own, and will adapt or die.

That's a completely unhelpful, overly simplistic straw man argument.

We restrict certain activities and places in the real world from certain people all the time. For example, not allowing people under 18 or 21 (depending on your country) into casinos. What we have now is essentially unrestricted access to pretty much anything and a fair assessment is that there is societal harm from that. We're creating gambling addicts (which is arguably the most harmful form of addiction), allowing predators to interact with children,, manipulating children through advertising and algorithms, flaming harmful behaviors like eating disorders, allowing mass cyberbullying and so on.

So saying "we should allow unfettered access to the internet" or even "it's the parents' responsibility" is naive, dismissive and has failed. The only question from here is what to d we do about it. You can say "nothing" but that's a losing argument.

I personally believe that the easiest thign to attack is advertising to minors. This will take away the financial incentive for these platforms to create addictive behaivors in minors. And most of these tech platforms have already built the infrastructure to do this. You don't allow advertisers to target an audience based on (actual or inferred) ages under 18. You extend that to proxies for age, like an interest in Minecraft. And you make advertising to children illegal.

Arguably, I'd go further and restrict certain features for minors, such as comments on Youtube and an algorithmic feed.

At the moment nobody is solving anything because it's simply a fight to move liability to someone else. Meta wants hardware vendors to be responsible because, guess what?, they have no hardware platform. Apple and Google likely want app to have to deal with it for the complete opposite reason.

I believe we should shift that liability to advertising.

Re: EU Age Verification Project Mandates Hardware-Bound Attestation

#25
post #24
post #18

All this ostensibly to keep teenage boys from watching Pornhub (when parental controls already exist). The real reason, of course, is to force people to connect strong real-life identifiers to online activity. Mobile first, then Windows. Then Linux is too weak to oppose on its own, and will adapt or die.

That's a completely unhelpful, overly simplistic straw man argument. We restrict certain activities and places in the real world from certain people all the time. For example, not allowing people under 18 or 21 (depending on your country) into casinos. What we have now is essentially unrestricted access to pretty much anything and a fair assessment is that there is societal harm from that. We're creating gambling add…

What you're saying is correct - but it's used to push a much more comprehensive lockdown of devices that has absolutely nothing to do with protection of minors.

It's as if the government first let businesses install slot machines at every street corner, then suddenly went "I'm shocked, shocked! that we have a massive epidemic of gambling addiction here, we have to mandate anti-gambling shock collars for everyone to tackle this urgent problem! There is no alternative!"

Re: EU Age Verification Project Mandates Hardware-Bound Attestation

#27
post #17
post #4

I don't understand where the all the EU anti-trust and anti-corruption regulators are here. _Governments_ enforcing that you have a Google or Apple account to participate in society is transparently absurd. This isn't only a digital sovereignty issue, it's also an anti-competition issue.

The reality of the matter is that it is virtually impossible for Europe to even begin to displace Apple or Google devices, and especially not operating systems and all the ecosystem that goes along with it. The EU politicians are just publicly paying lip-service to "digital sovereignty" while they quietly hope this all just blows over when Trump is gone in 2 years.

Agreed, I doubt that a mega-behemoth like Google or Microsoft could emerge in Europe. Especially not on a compressed timescale.

But if they really wanted digital verification without the surveillance capitalism built in, I’m sure there are plenty of companies that could do it. Especially if it was around an open source framework.

Re: EU Age Verification Project Mandates Hardware-Bound Attestation

#28
post #24
post #18

All this ostensibly to keep teenage boys from watching Pornhub (when parental controls already exist). The real reason, of course, is to force people to connect strong real-life identifiers to online activity. Mobile first, then Windows. Then Linux is too weak to oppose on its own, and will adapt or die.

That's a completely unhelpful, overly simplistic straw man argument. We restrict certain activities and places in the real world from certain people all the time. For example, not allowing people under 18 or 21 (depending on your country) into casinos. What we have now is essentially unrestricted access to pretty much anything and a fair assessment is that there is societal harm from that. We're creating gambling add…

> We restrict certain activities and places in the real world from certain people all the time. For example, not allowing people under 18 or 21 (depending on your country) into casinos.

These are not equivalent. Restricting access to a casino just requires showing an ID to a person. A few seconds later and that person has completely forgotten everything about you. They will not keep a record of your home address, etc. Perfectly privacy preserving. You have no such guarantee when you upload government IDs to a server.

I don't think anyone here minds restricting access, but that doesn't require completely destroying ownership rights over our own devices nor internet and device privacy.

All that really needs to be done is for servers to publish what type of content they show from a parental perspective in a machine-readable format and for devices to have parental controls that only allow access to servers that publish such info and which content is allowed by the parental settings.

This should be even more effective than solutions requiring uploading IDs since there's still going to be servers out there in other jurisdictions that simply don't care for such things.

Re: EU Age Verification Project Mandates Hardware-Bound Attestation

#29
post #24
post #18

All this ostensibly to keep teenage boys from watching Pornhub (when parental controls already exist). The real reason, of course, is to force people to connect strong real-life identifiers to online activity. Mobile first, then Windows. Then Linux is too weak to oppose on its own, and will adapt or die.

That's a completely unhelpful, overly simplistic straw man argument. We restrict certain activities and places in the real world from certain people all the time. For example, not allowing people under 18 or 21 (depending on your country) into casinos. What we have now is essentially unrestricted access to pretty much anything and a fair assessment is that there is societal harm from that. We're creating gambling add…

>> "We're creating gambling addicts (which is arguably the most harmful form of addiction)" --- I will need a source, because "arguably" is a very broad umbrella.

"Arguably" heroin addiction is the most harmful addiction because heroin is the most addictive substance, clouds judgement and drives the addict to all manners of sociopathic behaviour (not only theft or prostitition)

Re: EU Age Verification Project Mandates Hardware-Bound Attestation

#30
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a completely unhelpful, overly simplistic straw man argument. We restrict certain activities and places in the real world from certain people all the time. For example, not allowing people under 18 or 21 (depending on your country) into casinos. What we have now is essentially unrestricted access to pretty much anything and a fair assessment is that there is societal harm from that. We're creating gambling add…

>> "We're creating gambling addicts (which is arguably the most harmful form of addiction)" --- I will need a source, because "arguably" is a very broad umbrella. "Arguably" heroin addiction is the most harmful addiction because heroin is the most addictive substance, clouds judgement and drives the addict to all manners of sociopathic behaviour (not only theft or prostitition)

Fentanyl, no?
Post reply on HN