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Do Not Turn Child Protection into Internet Access Control

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Re: Do Not Turn Child Protection into Internet Access Control

#341

The big issue isn’t even age verification. The end goal is verified user identification. They want every transaction on the internet to be associated with the exact identity of the user. No more anonymity. In the short term the way it will be implemented is this — age verification will not be a binary, it will also want to push your DoB, name, location etc and they say “the choice is with the user” but the default wi…

I hope someone takes those Meta glasses or an Oculus or Apple Vision or something and hooks it up to clearview or some other facial recognition service and agentically scrapes OSINT sources to doxx people on the street, in real time. One glance and I have your full name, home address, SSN, all online handles and aliases, employment history, email, and phone number, instantaneously on a HUD. It doesn't even need to be…

My black-mirror prediction for how augmented reality and AI will interact: In order of horribleness.

1> Auto-nude. Today we can "nudify" photos and videos. Soon, augemented reality glasses will be able to nudify eveyone in real time. (This is totally possible today.)

2> Auto-tranlation. Cool. Everyone can talk to everyone, but users will have censorship options. I don't much like hearing australians so I will just have the glasses make them all sound like proper Texans. And the sound of people with alternative views to my own are replaced with calming country music.

3> Lie detection. Glasses will look for facial/voice body ticks suggestive of deception. Good luck talking your way out of a ticket, or explaining to you boss how you were "sick", when they have a lie detector online 24/7.

4> Censorship of "bad" objects. Signs with ads or news that I do not agree with will be blocked and replaced with more appropriate text. Mosques will appear as churches. Garbage and pollution will become happy birds and clear blue skies. Homeless people will be replaced with attractive young people (see #1 above).

5> Race replacement. I don't like certain races. So my glasses now make everyone Chinese. So long as I don't turn off the glasses, I can live my custom racist utopia.

Re: Do Not Turn Child Protection into Internet Access Control

#342
post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that required? The whole point of zero knowledge proofs is that it can run on untrusted devices.

Because true “zero knowledge” proofs are actually useless for age gating purposes. Conceptually, if a proof was truly zero knowledge and there were no restrictions on generating it, there would also be nothing stopping someone from launching a website where you clicked a button and were given a free token generated from their ID. If it was truly a zero knowledge proof it would be impossible to revoke the ID that gene…

It's also unclear what they'd even be useful for to begin with.

You need some kind of proof system if you need a central authority to certify something, but why is that required? The parents know the age of their kids. They don't need the government to certify that to them. And then the parents can get the kids a device that allows them to set age restrictions.

Whether those restrictions are imposed by the device on content it displays (which is the correct way to do it) or by the device telling the service the approximate age of the user (which needlessly leaks information), you don't actually need a central authority to certify anything to begin with because either way it's just a configuration setting in the child's device.

Re: Do Not Turn Child Protection into Internet Access Control

#343
post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens when everyone needs to use AI for their job? Genuine question that I think gets at the heart of the debate. Once a common technology that everyone has access to becomes powerful enough to alter the lives of others on command, do we as a society just need to do away with the concept of anonymity? We are all just too powerful in isolation, and too much of a threat to the collective, that we cannot reasonab…

>What happens when everyone needs to use AI for their job? Genuine question that I think gets at the heart of the debate. Considering most places does direct deposit and that requires a bank account (so KYC), I don't see what's particularly new here. Many places also do background and/or work eligibility checks, which again is a form of KYC. >Today, you can buy parts/print a completely untraceable firearm, so do we l…

> Considering most places does direct deposit and that requires a bank account (so KYC), I don't see what's particularly new here.

Slippery slope is a fallacy, they said.

> Many places also do background and/or work eligibility checks, which again is a form of KYC.

Except that it isn't KYC at all, both because employees aren't customers (most people are the employees of one company but the customers of hundreds or more), and because the majority of people don't have that requirement imposed on them by the government. There are many jobs you can get without a background check.

Re: Do Not Turn Child Protection into Internet Access Control

#344

I was a kid with unrestricted, unsupervised internet access, and it definitely affected many things in my life. If I happen to have a child in the future, they won't go through that. The Brazilian government passed a law requiring age verification for every site categorized as 16+. It can't be self-declared, so companies usually resort to facial scans and ID verification. I DO NOT want photos of our Brazilian childre…

I guess the opposite case might not be as interesting to many, but I achieved basically unfiltered internet access as a child, and it has been immensely helpful for me as a person. Everything I am today -- a programmer, technically literate, a founder of a startup with momentum, I am because I had freedom and autonomy as a child (which was not granted to me, rather achieved by me). Many of the people of my age who gr…

I also had the same experience (not just with Internet - I had unfiltered access to basically any and all reading materials), and I felt that on the whole it was a massively positive experience for me. I feel really sad for all the children today who mostly grow up in much more closely controlled environments. I understand why parents do that, but I'm also not at all convinced that most parents actually know what is good for their kids - just believe that they do.

Re: Do Not Turn Child Protection into Internet Access Control

#345

The big issue isn’t even age verification. The end goal is verified user identification. They want every transaction on the internet to be associated with the exact identity of the user. No more anonymity. In the short term the way it will be implemented is this — age verification will not be a binary, it will also want to push your DoB, name, location etc and they say “the choice is with the user” but the default wi…

An account level flag in a user account on an operating system is the opposite of verified identification. It is self assertion by the owner of the computer: the parent. If such a control works in the same way as enterprise supervision the child won't be able to install a vpn, or other software to bypass the control.

Re: Do Not Turn Child Protection into Internet Access Control

#346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s only too late when we stop fighting back and accept it as a given. Don’t underestimate civil disobedience and the hacker spirit.

UK showed how to deal with civil disobedience (fast tracked judicial process). Hardware attestation will deal with the hacker spirit. Above all, the LLM panopticon will watch us all. Technology will not save us. Nothing will save us but ourselves and we're busy making rent and doomscrolling.

There will always be some form of underground.

What's different is that, for a while, the early Internet age (and a little bit earlier - Usenet etc) made that underground very accessible. Now we're reverting back to the original situation where it was very much shunned and criminalized.

Re: Do Not Turn Child Protection into Internet Access Control

#347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope someone takes those Meta glasses or an Oculus or Apple Vision or something and hooks it up to clearview or some other facial recognition service and agentically scrapes OSINT sources to doxx people on the street, in real time. One glance and I have your full name, home address, SSN, all online handles and aliases, employment history, email, and phone number, instantaneously on a HUD. It doesn't even need to be…

My black-mirror prediction for how augmented reality and AI will interact: In order of horribleness. 1> Auto-nude. Today we can "nudify" photos and videos. Soon, augemented reality glasses will be able to nudify eveyone in real time. (This is totally possible today.) 2> Auto-tranlation. Cool. Everyone can talk to everyone, but users will have censorship options. I don't much like hearing australians so I will just ha…

This is great. I finally feel for the first time in my life that science has in fact gone too far. At this point living in the so-called "third world" to avoid digital-rape-as-a-service and the ever increasing pace of technology sounds eminently reasonable.

Re: Do Not Turn Child Protection into Internet Access Control

#348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I shouldn't have defended the API or age rating solution. It's just a trap in hindsight. That kind of solution must be rejected altogether even if it's the OS checking the app/website's age rating header, because we'd be giving the OS oligopoly (Apple, Google, Microsoft) way too much leverage, and in the long term they're going to make it so that you can only run their approved apps because unapproved apps didn't imp…

You can still get hardware that you can install your own OS on. But you have to be deliberate about picking it out before a purchase, rather than hoping to unlock a random carrier phone down the line. For example my phone is a Pixel running Graphene. It has a locked down bootloader that could only be unlocked with the online consent of Google. While this most certainly chafes me (and if I could snap my fingers and ma…

I don't think it's a market failure. The reality that password-gating software installation at the OS level can be done on most desktops but not most phones is the opposite sign of a market failure. Mobile OSes have increasingly stripped down capabilities in recent years precisely because of anti-competitive practices. The reason standard desktops have not evolved even better parental control features is not because they're not doing better than phones under a free market. They are already doing better in spite of the fact that most kids use desktops a lot less than they use phones. It's just that the absolute level of demand for parental control features has been low until recent years, and even this recent wave of demand is somewhat manufactured.

Re: Do Not Turn Child Protection into Internet Access Control

#349
post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not my understanding. This is what the bill says: Provide a developer who has requested a signal with respect to a particular user with a digital signal via a reasonably consistent real-time application programming interface that identifies [the age group]. So the app requests a signal (like, calling an API), and the OS returns the signal (returning the age group). Regarding API vs installation lock, TBH I don…

The California law is horrible because it forces everyone to let tech companies and governments decide what's suitable for children, rather than let parents decide. It's telling parents to give every app their child's age and trust that the apps will do the right thing. It also legitimizes personal data collection (in this case, the user's age) for every app and service on the Internet that wants to know your age. Th…

The California law is the closest thing to what we do in the physical world but better. We already decided as a society to limit the purchase of pornography, gambling, alcohol, tobacco, prostitution, drugs, via age gates and require the merchant to be liable for that. We already find this reasonable as a society. The California law recognizes the tracking problems of requiring a verifiable id online and instead recognizes that parental self-assertion at the point of account creation is enough.

Since tracking children is generally illegal, you can also voluntarily lie and label yourself as a child when you don't want to access such content.

Re: Do Not Turn Child Protection into Internet Access Control

#350
Unfortunately they won't be stopped, so we have to look for the solution ourselves:

- Linux distros without age verification (which excludes distros with systemd)

- decentralized/distributed microblogging: Nostr, Bluesky, Mastodon

- decentralized social news sites: Lemmy

- GrapheneOS

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