Related:
European "age verification" "app" forcing everyone to use Android or iOS
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48903777
Stop Killing the Internet: No Digital ID and No Age Verification
EU Age Verification Project Mandates Hardware-Bound Attestation
11–20 of 207 posts
Re: EU Age Verification Project Mandates Hardware-Bound Attestation
#12I 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 EU way is to think these things are “free” and then act surprised by the inevitable consequences five years later when it is irreversible. Our AI gods cannot save us soon enough.
What are the "AI gods" going to do in this scenario?
AI is about many things, but a big factor is enclosure.
Re: EU Age Verification Project Mandates Hardware-Bound Attestation
#13> Linux is not explicitly banned. Desktop Linux users could access a website and scan a QR code using a supported mobile wallet. That's a weird way of putting it. You'll basically need a second non-Linux device if you want to use Linux. If your reason for using Linux is "I want to continue using old hardware instead of quickly-obsoleted devices", then you're shit outta luck: you'll have to buy a (potentially second)…
We need to remember how to operate without the Internet, and de-risk our dependence on it. Whether that's reducing the use of computers in our daily lives, or getting more open-source-software-runs-offline-on-my-machine.
We did it before. We forgot at the time when things were more-or-less free.
(I don't know how we do this. I'm as dependent as ever.)
Re: EU Age Verification Project Mandates Hardware-Bound Attestation
#14I expect a gray/black market in TPM keys and the like will grow if this takes off, but hopefully the citizens will fight it very strongly before then...
...but then again, this is the EU, not the US.
Re: EU Age Verification Project Mandates Hardware-Bound Attestation
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's very commonly the anti-EU politicians who inevitably get into EU parliament (due to representative voting, ironically more democratic than the FPTP system we use in the UK, despite all the wailing about democracy) who endorse such obviously stupid ideas, as a way to undermine the credibility of the EU. What's frustrating is that it works really well, and occasionally they get something truly stupid through- whic…
I suppose you have a lot of data backing this claim? The head of the EU, Ursula von der Leyen, isn't known to be anti-EU.
No head of government is going to come out against what the government itself is doing, they have to defend every initiative, which is why they seem pretty ungenuine all the goddamn always.
I used to track the voting history of UKIP members, the site "VoteWatch Europe" used to make this easy, but it shut down in 2022.
UKIP were constantly voting for things to be discussed (when they bothered to vote at all), and then when they were discussed they would thump chest in the media about how the EU was talking about doing the thing they had voted to discuss (with the verbiage to suggest the EU would definitely do it, against the will of the British- forgetting entirely that we had a veto anyway...).
Re: EU Age Verification Project Mandates Hardware-Bound Attestation
#16> Linux is not explicitly banned. Desktop Linux users could access a website and scan a QR code using a supported mobile wallet. That's a weird way of putting it. You'll basically need a second non-Linux device if you want to use Linux. If your reason for using Linux is "I want to continue using old hardware instead of quickly-obsoleted devices", then you're shit outta luck: you'll have to buy a (potentially second)…
So much for the EU's mission to reduce e-waste.
Re: EU Age Verification Project Mandates Hardware-Bound Attestation
#17I 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.
Re: EU Age Verification Project Mandates Hardware-Bound Attestation
#18All 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.
Re: EU Age Verification Project Mandates Hardware-Bound Attestation
#19[flagged]
If it stick to its current trajectory it will implode in 10-20 years. France’s debt crisis will trigger Euro collapse and Germans would ditch Euro to not foot the bill for the French and the rest of the dominos would fall
Re: EU Age Verification Project Mandates Hardware-Bound Attestation
#20By an incredible coincidence, the (ex- ?) employee of a company known to lobby hard in the EU (Microsoft) and who's the author of a rube-goldberg kitchen sink many of you on HN loves so much (systemd), is now working on a system that's been described here as "an attack on general purpose computing". Attestations / Trusted Platform Module (TPM) / etc. are all in there:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46784572
How much do you love your systemd and the individual behind it now?
Can't wait to use your "amutable" Linux with hardware-bound attestation verifying your age now can you?
These people (the politicians behind such decisions, the people working on such platforms, those saying it's a good thing, ...) are enemies of freedom.