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

Opening up 'Zero-Knowledge Proof' technology to promote privacy in age assurance

blog.google

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 302 posts

Re: Opening up 'Zero-Knowledge Proof' technology to promote privacy in age assurance

#251

Post by acdha »

tsimionescu wrote: post #242
scotty79 wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

So can you give an example of a crazed man-hating feminist woman engaging in a mass shooting? Or just of a woman engaging in a mass shooting (alone, not with a man) in the last, say, 10 years? 20 years? 50 years? Because I can definitely give you examples of incels doing this. Not a huge amount, mind you, but at least some.

The asymmetry is striking: when feminists talk about incels, it’s about how to improve their lives and help them out of the cognitive trap they’ve fallen or been lured into. I’ve never seen the equivalent of the pervasive casual, often gleeful, calls for violence and degradation which characterize the “manosphere”.

Re: Opening up 'Zero-Knowledge Proof' technology to promote privacy in age assurance

#252

Post by Nevermark »

xinayder wrote: post #156
Nevermark wrote: post #128

If you need personalized government attestation to visit a site, then the government has the ability to dynamically deny and rescind your individual access to any site that adopts age verification, at any time. Once adult sites adopt the system, it will creep over to any site wanting to limit their liability. Banks. Business services. Eventually almost everyone. Liability the government will dramatize and escalate. Y…

We don't need age attestation or any kind of identity attestation, period.

You are framing the debate in a reasonable way.

But apparently are unaware that this debate is being forced by powerful unreasonable people who are not going to give up if we leave a resolution up to them.

Reasonable and informed people want to avoid that. By stronger means than repeating “I don’t need that” until we realize that didn’t work.

When a site you and i need requires you and I to register with our governments to access it, how is your reasonable opinion going to help us navigate that?

Re: Opening up 'Zero-Knowledge Proof' technology to promote privacy in age assurance

#253

Post by jplusequalt »

elcritch wrote: post #245
scott_w wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huge gap between producing material that depicts (presumably) consensual sexual activities between adults and telling young boys to commit rape.

Practically speaking there's not much difference since there's a large amount of violent or extreme pornography which also teaches boys that directly or indirectly. It also teaches girls that it's "ok" cause they see it online. There's many studies and organizations who publish warnings about violent pornography and young adults: Dr Ruth Weir of City St George's, University of London, said extreme porn had been "norm…

Unless I'm missing somethiny, that article has no data that backs up Dr. Ruth Weir's claim.

It first posits that adult content has been normalized online, then cites unrelated statistics about abuse victims who had watched adult content. There's nothing that convincingly links that that first statement to the latter data.

Re: Opening up 'Zero-Knowledge Proof' technology to promote privacy in age assurance

#255

Post by Nevermark »

A great number of people here are engaged in civilized debates about whether parenting needs age verification.

That might seem to be the issue, but it is a red herring.

Powerful people are ramming age verification through in a way that will surveil you and give government the ability to not just attest for your age, but surveil what sites you use, and revert their attestation, for anyone, on any site, for whatever reason.

Not just porn sites but any site they convince to use their age verification scheme.

Even Wikipedia is having to fight this with the help of the EFF to not force all its users to submit to this.

Wake up. We all need to wake up.

The purpose of an anonymizing open source alternative is to head off dystopia. Nuanced opinions about parenting are not a defense strategy. Not against a closed internet permissioning system run by governments. Implemented by people who are using parenting as a cover.

Your parenting opinions won’t help you log onto increasing numbers of sites that block you without a government supplied key.

Wake up.

We must not let governments use this issue to lock down the internet. But that is now the default outcome.

The problem is insidious.

Re: Opening up 'Zero-Knowledge Proof' technology to promote privacy in age assurance

#256

Post by elcritch »

jplusequalt wrote: post #253
elcritch wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Practically speaking there's not much difference since there's a large amount of violent or extreme pornography which also teaches boys that directly or indirectly. It also teaches girls that it's "ok" cause they see it online. There's many studies and organizations who publish warnings about violent pornography and young adults: Dr Ruth Weir of City St George's, University of London, said extreme porn had been "norm…

Unless I'm missing somethiny, that article has no data that backs up Dr. Ruth Weir's claim. It first posits that adult content has been normalized online, then cites unrelated statistics about abuse victims who had watched adult content. There's nothing that convincingly links that that first statement to the latter data.

Perhaps try reading the report linked in the third paragraph of the news article?

It's at: https://www.childrenscommissioner.gov.uk/resource/pornograph...

To quote from that report:

A literature review of 19 academic papers, drawing on multiple methodologies since 2005, conducted by the Government Equalities Office (GEO) to assess the relationship between pornography exposure and negative behaviours towards women and girls found that pornography use had a statistically significant association with attitudes supporting violence against women (with violent pornography showing an even stronger association). [44] A meta-analysis of 9 studies found a significant association between pornography use among adult men and attitudes supporting violence against women, such as ‘rape myth acceptance’. [45] The association was found to be significantly stronger for violent pornography than non-violent pornography. Other studies involving young adults, including Peter and Valkenburg (2009) [46] and Hald et al. (2013), [47] have found that past pornography exposure among young males is significantly associated with less egalitarian and more aggressive attitudes towards women. This is particularly worrying when young people are being exposed to pornography.

Re: Opening up 'Zero-Knowledge Proof' technology to promote privacy in age assurance

#257

Post by Groxx »

tzs wrote: post #68
Groxx wrote: post #13

I've been trying to figure out how zero-knowledge stuff would work in practice for age verification, where "when issued" (or extremely coarse, like what year), "to whom", and "where it's used" are hidden from everyone except the individual holding the proof (since that's the gold standard, and the only one worth accepting). I get that ZK techniques work, and reveal "nothing". That's useful. But if they reveal nothing…

Briefly, your government issues you a digital signed copy of a document, such as a driver's license or passport, that gets bound to a hardware security element that you own. In current implementations these are the secure elements of smart phones, but there is no reason that standalone hardware security elements could not be supported. When you want to provide information from that document to a third party a protoco…

TPM can solve the "neither side gets info about who you are or where it's used" part, but it seems like that might mean any TPM leak also means a single token can be used infinitely without detection, yea? Otherwise it's uniquely identifying, which wouldn't be even slightly private.

Re: Opening up 'Zero-Knowledge Proof' technology to promote privacy in age assurance

#258

Post by guilhas »

sciencejerk wrote: post #97
kentm wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not that I want my kids looking at porn or violent content, but I’m far more concerned about man-o-sphere influencers than that other stuff.

I had to Google "man-o-sphere". Is it particularly more dangerous or toxic than other identity-based activist communities? Genuinely curious to know

Here is the real manosphere no one tells you about https://youtube.com/watch?v=JshlJzZRi64

Re: Opening up 'Zero-Knowledge Proof' technology to promote privacy in age assurance

#259

Post by jplusequalt »

elcritch wrote: post #256
jplusequalt wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless I'm missing somethiny, that article has no data that backs up Dr. Ruth Weir's claim. It first posits that adult content has been normalized online, then cites unrelated statistics about abuse victims who had watched adult content. There's nothing that convincingly links that that first statement to the latter data.

Perhaps try reading the report linked in the third paragraph of the news article? It's at: https://www.childrenscommissioner.gov.uk/resource/pornograph... To quote from that report: A literature review of 19 academic papers, drawing on multiple methodologies since 2005, conducted by the Government Equalities Office (GEO) to assess the relationship between pornography exposure and negative behaviours towards women and…

[dead]

Re: Opening up 'Zero-Knowledge Proof' technology to promote privacy in age assurance

#260

Post by hoppp »

rcxdude wrote: post #238
hoppp wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its not really possible to know. the system is valid zkp but any of the services in practice can still collect personally identifiable information from their users. There is also nothing stopping the attestor to collude with the site you want to access, to reveal information about you.

If you are controlling the middle part of the zkp (or at least can validate it), then identification should not be possible through the zkp even if the attestor and and site collude with each other (they could maybe collude based on some other information, like IP address or browser fingerprinting, ofc).

I think if google provides the attestation and they also provide a client side dependency for the site, then they can collect all the data they want.

Also, nothing stops a site from having a flow like: 1. Please enter your age 2. Verify that it's correct using a proof

The zkp is valid as far as the tech is concerned but the sites can still do whatever they want.

Post reply on HN