401–410 of 750 posts
It’s not online age verification. It’s online identity verification. Would you vote for that? Prove who you are to visit this website? Would you do it to access Hacker News? Your newspaper? Didn’t think so.
The one and only method I will participate in is server operators setting a RTA header [1] for URL's that may contain adult or user-generated or user-contributed content and the clients having the option to detect that header and trigger parental controls if they are enabled by the device owner. That should suffice to protect most small children. Teens will always get around anything anyone implements as they are alr…
Or could have a header saying this is not adult-only content, and a parentally-controlled device will block things that don't participate.
So ideally you want a standardized header that can be used to self classify content into any number of arbitrary and potentially overlapping categories. The presence of that header should then be legally mandated with specific categories required to be marked as either present or absent.
So for example HN might be "user generated T, social media T, porn F" or similar with operators being free to include arbitrary additional categories (but we know from experience that most of them won't).
While this would be required by law, I imagine browser vendors might also drop support to load sites that don't send the header in order to coerce global compliance.
THe government shouldn't be raising anyone's children, that's what parents are for. If you're a bad parent, your kids will get access to bad things and could become an adult failure. The future of your family and your legacy is up to you, not the government. We don't need age verification to restrict the social darwinism of raising children.
I keep thinking we can't fight age verification by just saying "no" to it, and have to offer an alterative. Maybe we need to turn it on its head, point out that if we want legislation to help out with this, we could choose legislation that gives power to parents. Age verification laws put the power directly into the law itself, they're a blanket solution that gives all the power to legislators and that prevents paren…
How did you think this was going to be enforced?
Enjoy dying on that hill then because without mandatory ID for potentially harmful services like social media, we will continue to descend further into the brainrot that many of you suffer from today.
Age verification can be achieved without destroying anonymity and privacy online using anonymous credential systems, but it has to be designed that way from the ground up, and no one pushing age verification is interested in preserving privacy.
They are interested - interested specifically in opposing it. These groups don't care about age verification - it is a trojan horse for censorship.
It’s not online age verification. It’s online identity verification. Would you vote for that? Prove who you are to visit this website? Would you do it to access Hacker News? Your newspaper? Didn’t think so.
I want that. I'm tired of bots being half the internet traffic or more. It's driving the general public insane and anonymity on the internet has zero utility. If journalists need to send sensitive information, they'll always be able to use Tor.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I did. Restricting children’s access to certain things is not ageism. We can argue the merits of restricting children’s access to the internet, or certain books, or alcohol, or pornography, or whatever else. We can debate the merits of those various restrictions based on the benefits and costs to both the children and society at large. But it is not ageism to attempt to protect children. It is not ageism even of the…
It depends on what you're restricting and why. Restricting access to things based on age can absolutely be ageism if the thing does not need to be restricted.
The burden is still to demonstrate that a restriction is wrong. If that can’t be demonstrated, then labeling it ageism is a purely emotional appeal.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
tech companies care even less? how do you arrive to that conclusion? tech companies log/store EVERYTHING. this would be an absolute boon for them to be able unequivocally assign to you all of the data they track about you. suddenly, anonymous analytics become identified data and not just deanonymized data.
Logs of location data on people are already worth real money. The FBI has admitted to buying it. The companies that do age verification will absolutely be selling that data unless there are severe penalties for doing so, and what are the odds that the U.S. government passes a law making it illegal for the FBI to buy data? That's bad enough if you're a U.S. citizen. If you're a non-U.S. citizen, now you're in the situ…
I guess, but like, who? During the time TikTok was not available on an app store (even though the service wasn't stopped), people were trying some of the other Chinese apps, and they were not very compelling as the exodus never happened.
That solution doesn't negate parental freedom of choice, it facilitates it.
I am baffled at how often the "they don't want it, because of their ulterior surveillance motivations, therefore it isn't a solution" argument is made. "They" don't want it because it is a solution to the nominal problem, that they cannot abuse, and would negate their ability to use it as a cover with a large well-meaning voting constituency.
Two problems, nominal and ulterior, resolved in the right way by one solution.
When a nominally sensible problem is used as a cover for overreach, solving the nominal problem in a healthy way is the best offense. The alternative is an endless war of attrition, and the "hope" that politicians resist the efforts of well-paid lobbyists and tens of millions of well-meaning voting parents forever. That is a ridiculous strategy, doomed to fail, delivering irreversible damage. As is already evident by the abusable laws that are accumulating.
I worry at the lack of political acumen and foot-gun reflexes in the ethically-motivated technical community.
Stop endlessly fighting to lose less. Just play the winning move already. Stop the irreversible damage.