Look at W Social. The governments will team up with anyone, no matter how shady, as long as they promise to try to restrict free, unattributed speech. They'll team up with absolute sharks, as long as those sharks are gonna help sack and battle the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48584497
Disliking data centers, illegal immigration, or taxes is not a crime in the United States, nor is posting inconvenient messages about politicians, nor is getting a little too rowdy in a group chat. And none of these things are likely to be made illegal any time soon.
I always find this form of argument in favor of privacy (which is valuable in its own right to be clear) so roundabout. If you’re concerned about the government impinging on your freedom of speech, then why not write an essay arguing for expansive freedom of speech protections? That seems like a much more direct solution to the problem presented in this essay.
"Don't let them win. Don't verify your age. Don't give up your identity. If you absolutely must, find one of the numerous age verification services and pay in Monero."
Better yet, how about - "call your representatives"?
Some nerds, for lack of a better term, think crypto and cryptography are the answers to every privacy problem. The only way to fix society and the law is by engaging with those things. Not sidestepping them with cryptography, an unscalable approach in any case.
I'm deeply pessimistic about the future. The only group competent enough to oppose identity verification has its head in the sand.
Automated fines, like traffic radar control for free speech, will also become a norm as they won't be able to put everyone in jail.
But I'm not sure the liberal anarcho-tyranny power will be indefinitely immutable. Speech control might be one their last try to keep control in the west. They will crumble like soviet union.
That, and it defines children as perpetrators instead of victims. What right could a citizen ever claim in a world where even children are guilty?
There is a huge difference between protecting children and prosecuting/punishing children. Age verification can only be an implementation of the latter.
If we taught systems thinking in schools things like internet age verification would never get past being an idea on the back of a napkin. People struggle to consider the second-, third-, and nth-order effects of anything so asking them to consider what else might happen if we bring in laws and technical mechanisms to 'protect the children' is unfortunately too a big leap for a lot of them. Most people are bad at spotting causal links between parts of a system, and people who are good at it exploit that.
This is an excellent point. I'm self educated while my wife holds multiple degrees and a masters. Yet when she saw a news article about age verification (something I've been following for years thanks to HN) she was like "this is good" and I'm like "why" and the ensuing discussion made it clear that she didn't really think about the repercussions of age verification, just that seemingly smart people in positions of power seemed to think it was a good idea.
And I think this is dangerous. We have smart people like my wife who would probably vote Yes on this if it came to our ballot, because the smart people who wrote the measure were able to control the narrative.
Not that I'm so smart, mind you. I just follow HN and EFF so I'm exposed to this kind of stuff. I'd probably be blind to such things outside of the tech world. I'd love to say that I'd think of nth order effects when at the ballot but honestly maybe I won't.
Nth order effects are unpredictable. You can only observe them after the fact. Systems thinking is a debugging methodology, not at all
a crystal ball. Witness: your comment makes a bunch of predictions that are very unlikely to be true.
I was asking the Google llm search about why iterative games don't reach their competitive equilibrium the round after revealing the theory. In my example, it was the "guess 2/3 the average game", and I asked it why my class didn't immediately converge to zero after it was explained. The llm said people are lazy and I have autism because I couldn't identify or understand the stopping criteria used by my classmates. I'm still confused.
Devil's advocate - what's the nth-order effect of the current internet / social media setup that we currently have? How much damage is it causing? Who did the analysis on that and decided what ended up with today is the best setup?
My theory is that age verification is just another way to push human verification. These large tech companies need a way to verify a user is a real person and not an AI bot. Both for displaying ads to real users and cutting down on spam.
Nobody would support a "give away my anonymity online so I can be shown an ad for Coca Cola" bill. But it's easier to sell a law to boomers and lawmakers if you use the disguise of "It's for the children ." As if any of these companies care about the well being of children. See Meta confirming their platforms affect the mental health of children and doing nothing about it. Also platforms like TikTok and YouTube optimizing their algorithms for stealing user's attention spans.
"The Carnival in Venice was first documented in 1296, with a proclamation by the Venetian Senate announcing a public festival the day before the start of Lent. Unquestionably one of the most well-known Carnival festivities in the world, the Carnival of Venice is rife with mystery, adventure, and conspiracy. The day served to break down barriers between people of different economic standings and religious beliefs. During the Renaissance, masked comic performers performed in Venice's piazzas."
"The tradition of wearing masks seems to stem from the 13th century. During the ages the Venetians disguised themselves with mask whenever they thought necessary. It allowed them to escape from the rigid rules of the class hierarchy. All classes could mingle, men could be women, women could be men. It also led to unwanted behaviour, from throwing eggs filled with ink to all imaginable kinds of vulgarities. Masks made people unrecognisable, so they could not be prosecuted.
Near the end of the Republic, the right to wear masks in daily life was severely restricted. By the 18th century, it was limited to three months starting at December 26 and ending on the last day of Carnival, Shrove Tuesday. Masks were also used in ceremonies, eg. when ambassadors arrived and at the five ritual grand banquets offered each year to Venetian dignitaries by the doge. This resembles the Masquerade Balls during Carnival nowadays. Venetian noblemen and noblewomen wore a costume called a bautta consisting of a white mask (volto), a tricorn hat (tricorno), a hood worn under the hat (zendale) and a tabarro, a loose-fitting cloak. There were subtle differences between noble and non-noble (cittadini or popolani), and the popolani were known to wear more colorful, fun masks to festivities like the bull runs."
We do need a decentralized scalable permissionless platform for speech. For it to remain sustainable, there should be a slight cost in Monero to making each post on it, preloadable in batches.
This is a reminder to curate and prune all your past social media contribution, because when this goes thru, you KNOW they will apply it retroactively. You'd loathe to lose your cushy job over a moment of lucid honesty back in 2011.
I think we should go one level higher and question when having opinions and being a multi-dimensional human became a professional risk. That has certainly not always been the case.
It doesn't have to be, FWIW. We have all the technology we need to decouple attribution from identity. We can achieve efficient and mathematically perfect unlinkability.
Yet the powerful continue to insist on "papers, please" anonymity-rending personal authentication over anonymous authorization. It's not often that the villains of history so clearly identify themselves.
My bunch is that the people driving this stuff were unaware that age verification could be privacy-preserving and can't exactly back down now.
I think you can look at all things pessimistically, like this article does but at the end of the day we all agree that there are things online we don't want our kids seeing or engaging with and it takes regulators to push how we protect them from those online places. What other options to regulators have?
Age restriction has been around for longer than the internet itself, so its regulators applying that logic to the online world.
Whilst I think age verification has its issues, I don't see what other options they actually have. I'll also make the point that in Australia, our regulations explicitly require that Government ID verification CANNOT be the only way and that companies must adopt an additional approach.
Almost everything in technology used to protect us can be used against us by those want or choosing to do the wrong thing, does that mean we don't do anything?
> These "age verification" laws are - by design - identity attribution systems. They attribute digital identities (accounts) to physical identities (SSN, ID, etc..). This is government's ideal situation, the ability to quickly (automatically?) get identifying information about inconvenient people regardless if they're a criminal or not.
I'll call it out because your article doesn't, but does reference Australia. Here our eSafety commissioner has set the requirements such that the use of Government ID for verification must not be the only option.
There are other age verification technologies that do not assign identity but use other means as a method to identify age. For example, when our ban came into play I wasn't all of a sudden required to offer my ID.
Right now, our identity is kinda tied to a string of letter (password). This password can technically be passed around, created and destroyed at will. Tomorrow, our identity is going to be tied to you as a person. So messages will be signed by YOU as a person.
Fascism will lose in the long run. Right now the lobbyists
coordinate rather effectively, looking at how many democracies
already succumbed here. Well, we need direct democracy - the
system that we have right now with regard to democracies, is
undermined by corruption.
89 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 37.2 ms ] thread> Everything you say CAN and WILL be used against you.
Especially when what you said has already been recorded and tied to your identity before you faced the authorities.
Edit: from last week https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48632269
I always find this form of argument in favor of privacy (which is valuable in its own right to be clear) so roundabout. If you’re concerned about the government impinging on your freedom of speech, then why not write an essay arguing for expansive freedom of speech protections? That seems like a much more direct solution to the problem presented in this essay.
Better yet, how about - "call your representatives"?
Some nerds, for lack of a better term, think crypto and cryptography are the answers to every privacy problem. The only way to fix society and the law is by engaging with those things. Not sidestepping them with cryptography, an unscalable approach in any case.
I'm deeply pessimistic about the future. The only group competent enough to oppose identity verification has its head in the sand.
There is a huge difference between protecting children and prosecuting/punishing children. Age verification can only be an implementation of the latter.
And I think this is dangerous. We have smart people like my wife who would probably vote Yes on this if it came to our ballot, because the smart people who wrote the measure were able to control the narrative.
Not that I'm so smart, mind you. I just follow HN and EFF so I'm exposed to this kind of stuff. I'd probably be blind to such things outside of the tech world. I'd love to say that I'd think of nth order effects when at the ballot but honestly maybe I won't.
This plus methods of narrative steering and psychological manipulation in general.
Though I can't see this happenning while the transnational cartel is still at the helm.
Nobody would support a "give away my anonymity online so I can be shown an ad for Coca Cola" bill. But it's easier to sell a law to boomers and lawmakers if you use the disguise of "It's for the children ." As if any of these companies care about the well being of children. See Meta confirming their platforms affect the mental health of children and doing nothing about it. Also platforms like TikTok and YouTube optimizing their algorithms for stealing user's attention spans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnival_in_Italy#Venice
"The tradition of wearing masks seems to stem from the 13th century. During the ages the Venetians disguised themselves with mask whenever they thought necessary. It allowed them to escape from the rigid rules of the class hierarchy. All classes could mingle, men could be women, women could be men. It also led to unwanted behaviour, from throwing eggs filled with ink to all imaginable kinds of vulgarities. Masks made people unrecognisable, so they could not be prosecuted.
Near the end of the Republic, the right to wear masks in daily life was severely restricted. By the 18th century, it was limited to three months starting at December 26 and ending on the last day of Carnival, Shrove Tuesday. Masks were also used in ceremonies, eg. when ambassadors arrived and at the five ritual grand banquets offered each year to Venetian dignitaries by the doge. This resembles the Masquerade Balls during Carnival nowadays. Venetian noblemen and noblewomen wore a costume called a bautta consisting of a white mask (volto), a tricorn hat (tricorno), a hood worn under the hat (zendale) and a tabarro, a loose-fitting cloak. There were subtle differences between noble and non-noble (cittadini or popolani), and the popolani were known to wear more colorful, fun masks to festivities like the bull runs."
https://www.carnival-in-venice.eu/venetian-carnival-masks.ht...
‘If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him”
The internet needs new spaces that are more decentralized and less in bed with governments.
We already lost our freedom when we agreed to move from IRC to Discord, from phpBB to Reddit, etc.
The teenagers who are blocked from mainstream social media will deliver us new free online spaces that are better than what they're blocked from.
Device attestation is another - making sure you're using an unmodified government approved operating system and apps linked to your ID.
Yet the powerful continue to insist on "papers, please" anonymity-rending personal authentication over anonymous authorization. It's not often that the villains of history so clearly identify themselves.
My bunch is that the people driving this stuff were unaware that age verification could be privacy-preserving and can't exactly back down now.
Everyone else can stay anonymous.
I look forward to hearing why that won't work and what problems it will cause.
Age restriction has been around for longer than the internet itself, so its regulators applying that logic to the online world.
Whilst I think age verification has its issues, I don't see what other options they actually have. I'll also make the point that in Australia, our regulations explicitly require that Government ID verification CANNOT be the only way and that companies must adopt an additional approach.
Almost everything in technology used to protect us can be used against us by those want or choosing to do the wrong thing, does that mean we don't do anything?
I'll call it out because your article doesn't, but does reference Australia. Here our eSafety commissioner has set the requirements such that the use of Government ID for verification must not be the only option.
There are other age verification technologies that do not assign identity but use other means as a method to identify age. For example, when our ban came into play I wasn't all of a sudden required to offer my ID.