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I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services

neilzone.co.uk

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Re: I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services

#551

Post by autoexec »

pibaker wrote: post #546
autoexec wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It happens all the time, and its as easy as sending a phone a text, or a packet, or escaping a sandbox, but you'll rarely be aware of it when you're infected because unlike the old days where malware would fill your screen with ads or something today they just silently collect your data or use your internet connection for careful port scans or DDoS attacks. NSO Group spyware (or similar) could be on your phone right…

No nation state actor is going to waste a 0day on a random nobody. Even the recent Notepad++ exploit was only used against specific political targets. Any actor smart enough to be able to have an arsenal of 0days at their disposal is also smart enough to use them only where they are worthwhile because they will only get to do it once. Believing you are more under threat from sophisticated government hackers rather th…

We've seen examples of phones being hacked which belonged to journalists, producers, editors, activists, staffers at NGOs, lawyers, security researchers, doctors, CEOs, HNWIs, government workers, and even their families and friends. You can bet there are people here on this site which would easily be considered valuable enough targets and because the people those targets associate with are also being hacked you can bet that there are lot of "random nobodies" caught up in it. It's also not just governments using attacks on cell phones, those just tend to be the most dangerous.

Re: I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services

#552

Post by greatgib »

cortesoft wrote: post #163
bArray wrote: post #6

I was sitting in a room the other day with a young adult, we were searching for additional algorithm learning materials. They searched in Google, and accept the cookies. They clicked on a website, and accepted those cookies too. They then started entering their email address to access another service. I was completely taken aback. I'm the sort of person that either rejects the cookies, or will use another site entire…

I am in my mid forties, been working as a professional software developer for over 20 years. I click “accept the cookies” almost every time. I just personally don’t feel it’s worth the effort and cost to try to avoid it. What “dark pattern cookie trick” are you worried about? I just can’t come up with a scenario where it will actually harm me in any way. All the examples I have heard are either completely implausible…

In a single given website, accepting cookies look innocuous.

But to me, what is mind blowing, is when one day you accept the cookies on random e-commerce or review website about vacuum cleaner, and then later when you browse news or look at videos, there is suddenly a constant stream of advertisement for vacuum cleaners, everywhere.

Re: I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services

#553

Post by chickensong »

cortesoft wrote: post #527
chickensong wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> choosing an individually suboptimal option with my wallet hurts me That may be true, particularly in the short term, but you might be hurting everyone else including yourself in the long term. Opening your wallet sends a signal to the receiving business to keep doing what they're doing, even if we all know it's bad. There's also a cultural aspect to consider. It's normalized to not think of anything other than cost…

> Opening your wallet sends a signal to the receiving business to keep doing what they're doing, even if we all know it's bad. That is exactly my point, though. The signal from my personal transactions isn't going to be enough to change anything. It will be drowned out by everyone else. Of course, you are right that if enough people closed their wallet, then the business would have to change. However, that is STILL t…

Agreed, it's not simple to make change, and I wasn't suggesting that. I'm just promoting doing something instead of waiting for top-down solutions, which, even if they materialize, still aren't as cool as bottom-up culture change IMHO.

Is it effective? Probably not in the short term, at least for the intended purposes, but secondary effects like personal growth, satisfaction, and social dynamics might be realized.

Re: I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services

#554

Post by majorchord »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #430
kalaksi wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is pretty paradoxical and got me thinking. I don't know how to measure the value of my vote. I feel like the immediate value is less than the effort, but on the other hand, I don't think it's so simple. As you said, if no "rational" people vote, that's catastrophic and so I'm helping to maintain a larger system. Maybe a culture. Movements can have collective power no individual can have, but they can't exist witho…

It's not paradoxical and the attitude expressed by GP that it's not "rational" is exactly the sort of thinking that leads to rationality getting a bad name. Cooperation to the detriment of the individual in the animal world is exactly the same phenomenon in a much simpler system. That is widely and repeatedly evolved so we know for a fact that the game theory works out in a vacuum (ie without human cultural factors).…

Animal cooperation proves that game theory is universal, but it does not prove it works in a vacuum for humans.

- Biology gives us the instinct to cooperate and the capacity for empathy.

- Capitalism provides the mechanism to scale that cooperation to millions of strangers.

- Institutions (laws/culture) provide the rules that prevent the "vacuum" from devolving into a state where the strongest exploit the weakest (which is actually what happens in nature when policing fails).

Therefore, in a capitalistic society, cooperation to the detriment of the individual (e.g., paying taxes, following labor safety rules) is not just a biological imperative; it is a social contract enforced by culture to allow the complex system to function. Without the cultural layer, the biological layer alone is insufficient to sustain a modern economy.

Re: I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services

#555

Post by uyzstvqs »

renjimen wrote: post #371
uyzstvqs wrote: post #195

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: The standard should be that devices ask whether the user is a minor during setup, and make that available as an is_minor boolean to all apps and websites. Children's devices are almost always set up by parents, and the setting can be protected by a parental PIN code. This method is effective while being completely private and local. Though I can't take credit for the idea.…

It's only effective if "Children's devices are almost always set up by parents", which is a big assumption. My parents were about as tech savvy as you could reasonably expect but I still got away with buying R-rated video games and such. Kids are persistent and the dangers aren't always obvious.

If kids are being persistent and the parent is indifferent to it, then online age verification won't be effective either. Children will just ask mom and dad to verify their Roblox and Discord accounts.

Re: I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services

#556

Post by lanfeust6 »

mghackerlady wrote: post #479
cubefox wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Stop making your kids my problem! This is an interesting point: there is a trade-off between kids being denied access to inappropriate websites and adults not being forced to verify their age. We can't have both, so we must weigh which is more important. One could argue that protecting kids is clearly more important; on the other hand, there are way more adults in the world than kids, so more people are impacted wi…

I saw porn when I was under 18, and I'd wager the majority of people also have going back to the 70s or 80s. We all ended up mostly normal

Millenials are the first generation that had massive, unrestricted access to porn online. I'd wager a good chunk were negatively affected. Overconsumption was not much of a risk, until it was. To say nothing about extreme content.

Re: I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services

#557

Post by lokar »

cubefox wrote: post #440
a456463 wrote: post #217

Stop making your kids my problem! We have everything to hide. It is called personal identity. All data online managed by companies will always be misused, lost to scammers, blamed back to you for something you never did, and hunt you down.

> Stop making your kids my problem! This is an interesting point: there is a trade-off between kids being denied access to inappropriate websites and adults not being forced to verify their age. We can't have both, so we must weigh which is more important. One could argue that protecting kids is clearly more important; on the other hand, there are way more adults in the world than kids, so more people are impacted wi…

It's also important to understand that this is not a binary situation. You will never keep 100% of the kids from 100% of the inappropriate material. So it should be a debate about levels, and trade-offs.

IMO, the approach of having the large / popular commercial OS platforms ask you the birthday of the primary user on install (and secure that so it can't be changed), and then reveal the age (bucketed to a range) to apps. If you don't have kids, or care what they see, just put Jan 1 1900 (or have an explicit opt-out, which puts you in the last bucket). After that it's up to parents to parent.

Re: I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services

#558

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

bpt3 wrote: post #523
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That the geeks solution to “I don’t trust $companyX” is that “I am going to compile an alternate solution without looking at the source code”. Is kind of meaningless.

Good thing no one has proposed that solution anywhere other than your own mind.

> but I can build Firefox from scratch and review the source code if I want, unlike Safari.

You didn’t say this?

Re: I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services

#559

Post by bpt3 »

jen20 wrote: post #545
bpt3 wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have kids, and I know hundreds of parents across large portions of the country. None of them have these issues. A person driving down a private road and threatening to call CPS because they can't see the parent is not rare? And the parent poster didn't just say someone threatened to call the cops, they said that they would be jailed in two very specific circumstances where jailing him would have led to very negativ…

> Many people are stupid, and do stupid things like calling the cops for no valid reason at all. Those people are annoying and can be ignored, Either you are disingenuous or incredibly sheltered. It's hard to tell which, but I suspect I know.

Neither, I'm just not catastrophizing my life or everything around me to obtain Internet points.

What the original poster was describing is exceptionally rare, which is why neither he nor you have anything meaningful to say about it.

Re: I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services

#560

Post by andai »

1shooner wrote: post #212
cortesoft wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am in my mid forties, been working as a professional software developer for over 20 years. I click “accept the cookies” almost every time. I just personally don’t feel it’s worth the effort and cost to try to avoid it. What “dark pattern cookie trick” are you worried about? I just can’t come up with a scenario where it will actually harm me in any way. All the examples I have heard are either completely implausible…

First of all, if you don't practice any tracking limitation, you're almost certainly giving additional parties (directly or otherwise) access to your personal information. This is marketing data brokerage, this is the whole ballgame. To your point about the actual harm, I've come to see it as a kind of ecological problem. Wasting energy and sending more trash to a landfill doesn't harm me individually, at least not i…

To give a random example of what kind of information the brokers have: years ago I heard multiple reports of women who found out they were pregnant through internet advertising. The surveillance networks detected changes in their behavior and determined that they were pregnant, before they realized it themselves.
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