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Online age verification is the hill to die on

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Re: Online age verification is the hill to die on

#601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Western society, for better or worse, is set up such that parents need to resume work as soon as possible. Saying the government has no responsibility in child rearing ignores the economic reality of parents.

"Because I have a job, it is now impossible for me to raise my children. I have to outsource this to a council of legislators because I'm simply too busy!" Bad argument, bad outcomes. These are exactly the "bad parents" I was referring to in my original comment. The government HAS no responsibility in raising your child, but they would LOVE to change that. It's absolutely imperative for the human race that that does…

Besides the bad reinterpretation of my point, how to solve the problem? It is simply insufficient to say "yeah both parents work full time with the sword of damocles hanging over their head but too bad so sad". Without changing the economic situation there is no changing the child rearing situation. One caused the other. It's all well and good to say this is imperative for the species but I see no solution offered. The economic situation must change and the government is responsible for this.

Re: Online age verification is the hill to die on

#602
post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's just making it harder for honest people to pay for what they like. I have a female friend who creates that kind of content. Her take is that this is very much intentional. There is a general crackdown on porn in the US. They're not just trying to make it difficult for the clients, but also difficult for people to make this kind of content, distribute it and get paid for it. Of course none of this makes sense.…

In China, people generally share porn through closed social network groups.

Given what we know about China's internet, is there any real privacy in those groups if authorities wanted to crack down on them?

Re: Online age verification is the hill to die on

#604
post #560
post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, why are those "real people" actually not willing to do their job? I am so pissed with parents who think the government is supposed to solve their own inability to raise a child.

Well for a start not all of them are very tech savvy, and we've built a world in which tech is essential to their day to day lives, including for their kids. If school demands the kids have a variety of devices to do their work, and they have no idea how to lock those down to exclude (for example) social media services that we know have been designed to be as addictive as possible, can you not see why they might want…

Right. I submit we are solving the wrong problem. Just establishing age vertification doesn't magically make these vast amounts of bad parents good parents. There is a ton of other things they can and will fail at, which their kids have to absorb. If we really cared about those kids, we'd have to reconsider a lot of things. And I know what I am talking about, had to grow up with an undiagnosed ADHS+anciety mother. It was hell. And even 30 years after i moved out, she still can't see what she failed at and continues to fail at. Age verification wouldn't have helped me. MAKING her seek treatment might have helped.

Re: Online age verification is the hill to die on

#605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish I could upvote this comment harder. I started having unsupervised internet access (with the family computer in the living room) when I was 8. I'm a functional and successful adult because I trusted my parents. When my mother forbade me from registering on online forums I complied. When I read "fellation" in some minecraft chat (albeit somewhat later) I asked my mom what it was and understood that "sex" was som…

I'm a functional and successful adult despite doing plenty online behind my parents' back as a kid. I don't think that part of our upbringings had as much of an effect on us as you suspect.

And I also suspect you did not grow up with kids whose parents clearly would like them to go away and stop bothering them. I also did lots of dumb stuff in my parents' back. The nuance here is that when you know that your parents love you, you'll tell them once you do something that's actually harmful/a big mistake, because you trust they'll help you instead of punishing you. I've seen people make "questionable" life choices, in my opinion, because they've learned, consciously or not, to not seek help from others and always hide/blame on others every problem them encounter.

Re: Online age verification is the hill to die on

#606
post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Any "verification" means unacceptable privacy violations. So I'm not necessarily arguing for age controls here, but purely on a technical level what do you think of schemes like Verifiable Credentials, which delegate verification to third parties that have already established your identity? In theory you can set up a system that works like this: 1. User goes to restricted site and sets up an account 2. Site forward…

Verification broker tracks sites which make requests and records it attached to personal data. Site either sells or leaks personal data along with history of all sites visited which require age verification. Also your solution requires a bank account, not something everyone has. Many do, but not all. Also the bank may not know "which" site you are visiting, but it does now know you are visiting sites which require ag…

> Verification broker tracks sites which make requests and records it attached to personal data.

How? What personal data?

The broker doesn't get anything other than "Site X wants to verify over 18, the user selected forward to Bank Y" and "Bank Y responds with TRUE"

> Also your solution requires a bank account, not something everyone has

True. Banks are only one example of an already trusted identity provider in this situation. But I get that there are gaps.

> Also the bank may not know "which" site you are visiting, but it does now know you are visiting sites which require age verification and how often.

Verification need only happen once per site, when setting up an account. This does introduce the possibility of a secondary market for approved accounts though, sure.

Re: Online age verification is the hill to die on

#607
post #573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Restricted-site.com gets the signed response from the broker, not the bank. In your situation there's not any need for "everyoneisover18.com" to defer to a real bank for a faked response as it signs things itself. But restricted-site.com doesn't trust everyoneisover18.com's key, it only trusts realbroker.com's key, so the response isn't accepted. If it is found to trust fake brokers like that it gets in trouble with…

That's why everyoneisover18.com forwards the request to my bank or my broker and gets my signature on the behalf of literally anyone. I may charge them $5 for this service.

> That's why everyoneisover18.com forwards the request to my bank or my broker

Doesn't work. The response won't be signed by real-broker.com.

The permission request/response itself goes direct from the server at restricted-site.com to the server at real-broker.com over TLS, so you can't MITM it, it's not controlled by the client and you won't be able to just pass out a cached response.

Your malicious client plugin could potentially forward the client session details to you, so you could operate the broker page, then log in to your bank's portal and approve that request, but I don't think that's going to scale very well and I imagine your bank is likely going to rate limit you.

Re: Online age verification is the hill to die on

#609
post #607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why everyoneisover18.com forwards the request to my bank or my broker and gets my signature on the behalf of literally anyone. I may charge them $5 for this service.

> That's why everyoneisover18.com forwards the request to my bank or my broker Doesn't work. The response won't be signed by real-broker.com. The permission request/response itself goes direct from the server at restricted-site.com to the server at real-broker.com over TLS, so you can't MITM it, it's not controlled by the client and you won't be able to just pass out a cached response. Your malicious client plugin co…

real-broker opens a web page allowing them to verify somehow. The browser extension sends me their URL and cookies so I can load the same page and verify myself. All automated of course.

Re: Online age verification is the hill to die on

#610
post #604
post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well for a start not all of them are very tech savvy, and we've built a world in which tech is essential to their day to day lives, including for their kids. If school demands the kids have a variety of devices to do their work, and they have no idea how to lock those down to exclude (for example) social media services that we know have been designed to be as addictive as possible, can you not see why they might want…

Right. I submit we are solving the wrong problem. Just establishing age vertification doesn't magically make these vast amounts of bad parents good parents. There is a ton of other things they can and will fail at, which their kids have to absorb. If we really cared about those kids, we'd have to reconsider a lot of things. And I know what I am talking about, had to grow up with an undiagnosed ADHS+anciety mother. It…

No argument here, I'm not saying they're right to demand that age verification is brought in to protect kids, or that we should give up privacy etc etc.

But coming at it from the angle that "It was never about protecting kids!" is itself incorrect and unhelpful to the debate.

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