Even for a "Citizens' Initiative", this stuff is remarkably tone-deaf. "No Digital ID" ignores the very-real need for people to prove their identity to government(-ish) entities online, and to do so in a reliable, cheap and convenient way. Sure, you do not want that ID to become mandatory for publishing or existing on the Internet in general, but that's a separate discussion: demand sufficient protection for anonymous/pseudonymous posts instead, which is absolutely something that needs to be codified as part of basic human rights.
"No age verification" is even deader-on-arrival. Parents are literally screaming at politicians to protect "the children" (as always), but pretty much everything that has been tried so far to silence those screams has failed (remember PICS, the Platform for Internet Content Selection: that was the last serious contender, and it has been dead for, like, 20 years). Again: demand a way to implement this securely and anonymously, don't take an untenable abolitionist stance or resort to hand-waving in the vague general direction of "parental responsibility": that has been tried, and it's not working anymore.
And, please, stop vilifying the EU in these matters. The UK left the EU, ostensibly so they could make "more sensible laws" in, specifically, respects like these, and they're now leading the assault on basic freedoms with even more fervor. And no, that's not just big-bad-Starmer's fault: it's a preview of what you have to argue against and propose a compromise for instead.
I haven't considered this before with SKG, but if this progresses, it means the EU parliament may choose to take action based on an initiative that potentially only a vocal minority supports [0], while coming across as if they were simply following the will of the people.
Not sure how I feel about that, sounds kind of problematic in retrospect. Especially since there's no mechanism for triggering EU-wide referendums to help this AFAIK.
[0] population of the EU: 452 million, unique signatures required for this: 1 million
> I haven't considered this before with SKG, but if this progresses, it means the EU parliament may choose to take action based on an initiative that potentially only a vocal minority supports [0], while coming across as if they were simply following the will of the people.
What, you don't think that's how things work already except "the people" whose will is being followed is an even smaller group. Is political activist having a bigger influence over politics than people who slouch on their couch supposed to be surprising or even bad?
I think it's a missed opportunity to not have called it "Stop spying on every EU citizen online". It would make for great headlines and might finally wake people up when they see that the EU has rejected a proposal called that.
"Stop killing the internet" unfortunately means nothing at all to the layman, they will still be using it pretty much exactly as they were before, and governments will just claim "See, internet is still working".
As far as I know the only thing that influences change is money. What methods could be implemented to take money away from governments that implement with such things? All of my ideas would be very low traction but there are clever people here on HN that I am sure could come up with a few better ideas.
One of my (probably dumb) ideas is:
- Create a legal presence in a country that does not require being dystopian, relaxed business laws, less regulation, lower taxes, move most of the corporate side of the business there. Take the tax revenue with you. It does not have to be all at once. Make the move a slow boil so they don't see it until it's too late.
Which countries, provinces, regions, states have the least regulation, least dystopian behavior and the least taxes? There has to be a incentive for business leaders and board members to move things around. Bonus if the saved money pays for a Gulfstream G650 ER or two.
A few things you can legally do online without ID or age verification in the US
1) buy cigars and pipe tobacco (but not cigarettes!)
2) Buy "CBD" by the pound
3) Buy ammunition, a barrel and the rest of gun parts for a glock, except a frame/receiver that can be 3d printed in a few hours to complete it.
4) Order and have delivered wine
But there are people arguing to skip all that and go to straight to ID for social media. It isn't about the children. It's about keeping tabs on who says what.
I'm reasonably confident that in the relatively near future, the Internet will be so overrun with bots and other worthless "content" that people will flock to platforms that confirm IRL identity.
So if i can not circumvent the surveilance- can i pack my wanted unsurveiled stuff into harmless data and send them- basically use the surveiled Internet as a UDP layer - over which my hidden unsurveiled internet goes via TCP?
We can talk, talk, and governments will still move forward. Or we can build an alternative that shows it's possible to get age verification while maintaining privacy.
There is a real way out of it -- the governments can have their cake and eat it too. I published several academic papers to prove it, and I'm open to building and deploying it. Would anyone want to work on this together:
The internet's (at least as we knew it) days were numbered as soon as the dot com bubble happened. It changed from a thing to share info to a thing to make money. It's irrecoverably corrupted and this blatant overreach for everyone's PII is just a symptom.
I'm glad they mention privacy preserving and being voluntary. It's possible to make digital ID that allows selectively revealing attributes without identity, and that could solve problems like bots, socketpuppets, etc along with reasonable age-gating. It could be an ideal internet if it's properly applied. The problem is it's difficult to verify all the promises are being kept, and if they're not it instantly becomes a true dystopia. And sites could use it in inappropriate ways resulting in discrimination.
> I'm glad they mention privacy preserving and being voluntary. It's possible to make digital ID that allows selectively revealing attributes without identity
Not without either being able to trivially let others use your proofs OR ending open computing. There is no zero knowledge proof about the slab of meat sitting in front of the screen.
There is a surprising amount of engineers who don’t understand what’s happening. So they deal with it as if it’s a funny thing… yeah if two police officers come knocking your door with hard data, you will just explain… and yeah, I mean kids, can bypass it… right? Wrong. This is not 1995. They can make very harsh laws and they can make it borderline impossible to bypass should some authority choose to do so.
The danger here is control: total and absolute control of who will be able to see what, at any given time. Once upon a time this was a hard problem, not anymore.
The last time I had police knocking at my door, it was a lot more than two, and they were readying their battering ram when I opened, and then immediately swarmed me and told me to sit down, and then I just explained and they realized their warrant was for a different address and they left. It was scary in the moment, but I never had a gun pointed at me and I wasn't even touched, so overall it left me with a rather positive impression of how search warrants are executed in Germany.
By all means, if you have an adversarial relationship with the state, fight every expansion of its power tooth and nail. But conversely, if you think that everything is going basically fine and the police are reasonable folks overall, then giving them more power doesn't look like a slippery slope straight to dystopia.
Kids can't bypass it because the systems they're trying to access are entirely different than they were in 1995. They are not accessing "the Internet" on which they connect to their friend's BBS's, irc servers, Usenet, etc. They're large, private systems which can absolutely be locked down by the parties that own them, on which activity has largely been centered.
Kids CAN absolutely bypass a lot still. Jump on Nostr and nobody can stop anyone -- a server can be run on any device (mine is on my phone), and it'll even run on non-TCP/IP networks (FIPS is in early days and still largely runs on existing infrastructure but absolutely doesn't rely on it staying there). Give it another few months with some LoRA build out (and enough motivation for the kids) and even the ISP gateway stops being a filter point. Not that ISP level controls have ever really been the most effective anyway, given the existence of VPN's and other tunneling methods (to say nothing of public wifi networks).
We see this happening in real time as India tries to stamp out Bitchat. The codebase has appeared on more and more repositories, and the most recent version of Bitchat is capable of transmitting itself for install to other devies without relying on any server or Internet at all.
So should we push back? Of course. At some point we would need to worry that they'll say enough is enough and make the hardware itself inaccessible. We're a long way off from that, and it'd be a surefire way to get a LOT more pushback.
But in the meantime, we shouldn't despair too much. The cypherpunks that gave us private and secure access on the Internet used by everyone today despite being once illegal to export didn't go anywhere. They're still here, kicking down every wall that gets put up, or at least pointing out that there are multiple ways around (or through) it.
Do you really think a technological solution will hep you if governments go down this path? At the very least you would something that isn't trivially detected and localized by an RF scanner.
I want the right to not be identified.
I also want the right to SELF identify.
I think the toxic culture of the internet has happened in part because anonymity leads to lack of accountability. I want to self identify and interact with other people who also self identify. The cost of running LLM botnets is going down. I cannot imagine how the next cycle of elections is going to be like on all countries. I understand the right to remain anonymous, that should remain, but that state should not be the default on these massively big platforms. Our brains and political systems are not designed for this.
And no, "get people to get rid of their smartphone voluntarily" like I see on the comments is not going to happen.
Toxic culture was always there but it really took of with social media where users often have zero shame to self-identify. There are anonymous communities that are far more friendly than the common insta group. "My brain" is perfectly fine with anonymous users.
And yes, anonymity should be the default because otherwise the alternative is that you need to identify. If not, most users would stay anonymous because it is simply the smarter decision with the exception that you seek exposure.
>The legislation should require anonymous or pseudonymous proof-of-age
NO. It really shouldn't. I will not comply. Porn sites can require this shit, but not the rest of the internet. Social media, dating websites, that's up to the users. If kids are on there, that's on the parents. Do your job, be the parent. I'm not going to let lazy good for nothing parents ruin the internet for everyone else.
Yeah I agree, forcing large websites to respect client side parental control settings is better (let the OS/browser set a request header with the age bracket that the website uses)
This initiative has the ID "ECI(2026)000011". If I understand this correctly, that means there have only been eleven citizen initiatives this year? Is that system working as designed, because that's a shockingly low number.
Edit: the initiatives themselves also have shockingly low numbers of signatures. A few thousand. A million are required for the EC to take notice. This system seems a bit shitty. But maybe I'm misunderstanding it.
The physical world has age checks when kids attempt to enter a premises with dangerous or unsuitable content - eg bars, casinos, strip joints. These seem largely accepted as a good thing. Why do so many seem to feel that the same protections are so outrageous when applied in the virtual world? Honest question, I can see both sides.
46 comments
[ 12.9 ms ] story [ 228 ms ] thread"No age verification" is even deader-on-arrival. Parents are literally screaming at politicians to protect "the children" (as always), but pretty much everything that has been tried so far to silence those screams has failed (remember PICS, the Platform for Internet Content Selection: that was the last serious contender, and it has been dead for, like, 20 years). Again: demand a way to implement this securely and anonymously, don't take an untenable abolitionist stance or resort to hand-waving in the vague general direction of "parental responsibility": that has been tried, and it's not working anymore.
And, please, stop vilifying the EU in these matters. The UK left the EU, ostensibly so they could make "more sensible laws" in, specifically, respects like these, and they're now leading the assault on basic freedoms with even more fervor. And no, that's not just big-bad-Starmer's fault: it's a preview of what you have to argue against and propose a compromise for instead.
Not sure how I feel about that, sounds kind of problematic in retrospect. Especially since there's no mechanism for triggering EU-wide referendums to help this AFAIK.
[0] population of the EU: 452 million, unique signatures required for this: 1 million
What, you don't think that's how things work already except "the people" whose will is being followed is an even smaller group. Is political activist having a bigger influence over politics than people who slouch on their couch supposed to be surprising or even bad?
"Stop killing the internet" unfortunately means nothing at all to the layman, they will still be using it pretty much exactly as they were before, and governments will just claim "See, internet is still working".
One of my (probably dumb) ideas is:
- Create a legal presence in a country that does not require being dystopian, relaxed business laws, less regulation, lower taxes, move most of the corporate side of the business there. Take the tax revenue with you. It does not have to be all at once. Make the move a slow boil so they don't see it until it's too late.
Which countries, provinces, regions, states have the least regulation, least dystopian behavior and the least taxes? There has to be a incentive for business leaders and board members to move things around. Bonus if the saved money pays for a Gulfstream G650 ER or two.
1) buy cigars and pipe tobacco (but not cigarettes!)
2) Buy "CBD" by the pound
3) Buy ammunition, a barrel and the rest of gun parts for a glock, except a frame/receiver that can be 3d printed in a few hours to complete it.
4) Order and have delivered wine
But there are people arguing to skip all that and go to straight to ID for social media. It isn't about the children. It's about keeping tabs on who says what.
I'm reasonably confident that in the relatively near future, the Internet will be so overrun with bots and other worthless "content" that people will flock to platforms that confirm IRL identity.
Only massive data gatherers should be able to track and know everything about people
Teens who want to see porn will be able to see porns, but they will learn somethings along the way to do so
This is caricatural of course, but it s just so dumb as law as enforcing age verification "anonymously" is just like a don quichotte battle at AI era
How will teens overcome the Android SafetyNet?
"Stop overcontrolling and overregulating every aspect of our lives!"
There is a real way out of it -- the governments can have their cake and eat it too. I published several academic papers to prove it, and I'm open to building and deploying it. Would anyone want to work on this together:
https://magarshak.com/papers.html
The technogy exists — it is called deepfakes LMAO
Not without either being able to trivially let others use your proofs OR ending open computing. There is no zero knowledge proof about the slab of meat sitting in front of the screen.
The danger here is control: total and absolute control of who will be able to see what, at any given time. Once upon a time this was a hard problem, not anymore.
By all means, if you have an adversarial relationship with the state, fight every expansion of its power tooth and nail. But conversely, if you think that everything is going basically fine and the police are reasonable folks overall, then giving them more power doesn't look like a slippery slope straight to dystopia.
Kids CAN absolutely bypass a lot still. Jump on Nostr and nobody can stop anyone -- a server can be run on any device (mine is on my phone), and it'll even run on non-TCP/IP networks (FIPS is in early days and still largely runs on existing infrastructure but absolutely doesn't rely on it staying there). Give it another few months with some LoRA build out (and enough motivation for the kids) and even the ISP gateway stops being a filter point. Not that ISP level controls have ever really been the most effective anyway, given the existence of VPN's and other tunneling methods (to say nothing of public wifi networks).
We see this happening in real time as India tries to stamp out Bitchat. The codebase has appeared on more and more repositories, and the most recent version of Bitchat is capable of transmitting itself for install to other devies without relying on any server or Internet at all.
So should we push back? Of course. At some point we would need to worry that they'll say enough is enough and make the hardware itself inaccessible. We're a long way off from that, and it'd be a surefire way to get a LOT more pushback.
But in the meantime, we shouldn't despair too much. The cypherpunks that gave us private and secure access on the Internet used by everyone today despite being once illegal to export didn't go anywhere. They're still here, kicking down every wall that gets put up, or at least pointing out that there are multiple ways around (or through) it.
The control bit is the dangerous one, sure.
i.e. drone swarms replacing ISPs?
And yes, anonymity should be the default because otherwise the alternative is that you need to identify. If not, most users would stay anonymous because it is simply the smarter decision with the exception that you seek exposure.
NO. It really shouldn't. I will not comply. Porn sites can require this shit, but not the rest of the internet. Social media, dating websites, that's up to the users. If kids are on there, that's on the parents. Do your job, be the parent. I'm not going to let lazy good for nothing parents ruin the internet for everyone else.
Edit: the initiatives themselves also have shockingly low numbers of signatures. A few thousand. A million are required for the EC to take notice. This system seems a bit shitty. But maybe I'm misunderstanding it.