A couple months ago, I saw people everywhere online (including HN) saying they love the idea of social media bans for kids. They love the idea of keeping people under 18 safe from the dangers of porn and mature games and other unclean things as well. Now governments around the world are acting in unison to happily give those people what they want, and people are suddenly confused and pissed that these laws mean you n…
Requiring photo IDs is not the only solution. Things don't have to be implemented that way. I can be both for privacy in this case and limits on social media. Australia already requires you to register for voting and other things, so the trivial solution here is: give out anonymous time-limited tokens from the gov site, with no logging. Essentially a signed timestamp + random number. > People who asked for social med…
The trivial workaround is for people to create ad supported websites to hand out those tokens.
If there’s no logging then they can’t determine who’s abusing it or if they’ve even generated a different token recently, so people can generate and hand out all the tokens they want.
So then the goalposts move again, and now there’s some logging in this hypothetical solution to prevent abuse, but of course this means we’ve arrived at the situation where accessing any website first requires everyone to do a nice little logged handshake with the government to determine if they have permission. What could go wrong?
The real workaround is for people (including kids) to buy themselves a VPN subscription for a couple bucks per month and leave all of this behind while the old people are letting jumping through hoops.