Posted by bilsbie 8 hours ago
Probabilistic verification using behavioral signals and metadata (device age, account age, interaction patterns) doesn't perfectly verify age but massively reduces the privacy trade-off. Most platforms optimize for regulatory compliance, not actual safety.
Anonymous and uncensored information exchange can prevent the vast majority of violent conflicts and shorten the necessary ones. Most violence in human history could have been prevented if every human being had 1) the ability to telepathically communicate with anyone else in the world without being eavesdropped, and 2) the ability to broadcast information anonymously to all of humanity in real-time. I will leave the details of why for you to deduce. These things are within reach right now for the first time in history. So we can and should build the decentralized web, and democratize the entire computing supply chain all the way down to chip fabbing and electricity generation. It is the greatest unrealized potential of the Internet, and we mustn't cede ground to ensure the path to that future remains open.
(If anyone is offended by this, don't worry, I'm talking about the other side; I'm sure your side is full of reasonable adults who just get a little carried away sometimes.)
Slippery slope arguments and things like it are not going to convince people, "just parent your kids" is not going to convince people. Not because they're wrong, but because on balance they feel like the damage to children being exposed to this content is worse than the potential civil liberty issues.
It will be very difficult to explain to people why this is not the same as alcohol being age-gated and you having to prove your identity to access it. Technically there should be no real reason we cannot do age attestation without fully revealing our identities anyway, there will need to be trust at some point in the system but the reality of the real world is that there is already and it's far less secure than we'd like.
This is why you don't have a technologically effective solution, here. "Trust" in this situation is a weasel word for surveillance, just like the pinkie promise that Client Side Scanning would never be abused by the government. Trust would not stop child abuse, or meaningfully prevent access to online pornography. Trust is not a technical solution, it's a political goal.
If you have a productive suggestion, now is the time to voice it. All of the non-technical hand wringing is not helpful either, and feeds into the slippery slope logic that HN should be avoiding.
Is all security a weasel word for surveillance? You answer a valid argument with a meme. It is very unproductive.
How do you suggest to disallow children access to pornography, harmful content, etc? Or are you arguing that any solution is worse than the harm that bad actors in search of money and political gain are doing to children?
If the security asks you to "trust them"? Yeah, that's usually pretext for hidden abuse.
When the Wizard of Oz says "pay no attention to the man behind that curtain" then you don't look the other way. Trust is unnecessary in situations where transparency is demanded. Accepting "trust" is equivalent to accepting every single abuse of the technology, up to and including using age verification to facilitate child abuse. Do you really "trust" the internet to use this power for good alone?
> How do you suggest to disallow children access to pornography, harmful content, etc?
Stop leaving them unattended in front of the TV. It worked in the 1980s, it still works with the iPad (gasp! screen time?).
This whole argument reeks of the Catholic moms protesting HBO, desperate to make themselves the victim. Bad parenting is not the TV network's problem. You cannot contort it into a working argument or legitimate ethical quandary. The solitary reason we see age verification pushed so hard is to promote online surveillance. If you want to enrich and entertain your kids without exposing them to topics you consider unsavory, buy them a book instead of an iPad. It's not rocket science.
I agree that the "think of the kids/terrorists/puppy killers" rhetoric is effective, but I don't think that's a reason to dilute my stance. I haven't seen a single age verification proposal that both works and isn't abusable. I cannot imagine a technical solution to this issue any more than I can write a Python program that detects terrorists. It is simply a bad idea that endangers children more than it could possibly protect them.
Fine. All we need is a password-protected toggle in each app that enables child mode, and another toggle in the phone settings that locks app installation/uninstallation. Remote verification schemes are completely unnecessary. For details see:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47273612
The way people are reacting is not extremist at all. Remember, the government protects child predators if they're rich or powerful enough. What more evidence do you need that they aren't doing this for the children? We should call it out for what it is.
But the verification is not to prove you're a children. Everyone will be considered children until proven otherwise, which will not prevent this scenario at all.
You are intentionally lying about what people are angry about here, which is the exact opposite the "balanced" discussion you want. Age verification violates the privacy of adults, which is why people hate it. To claim otherwise, is incorrect.
Is your wallet big enough to afford to say no and unplug? Mine is but what about the 99%?
I also wouldn't be surprised if there were plenty of people only dimly aware of the idea of a VPN who are now sitting up and taking note.
That won't save you from being targeted. Flawed methodology from the prosecution doesn't matter if all your stuff gets seized, and they really want to hurt you. See Black Ice:
[1]https://old.reddit.com/r/Freenet/comments/4ebw9w/more_inform...
[2]https://retro64xyz.gitlab.io/assets/pdf/blackice_project.pdf
Such as following directions from a YouTube video that instructs them to do sketchy things.
Self-hosted vpns and b2b vpns will remain unaffected but that doesn't matter, they don't look for 100% coverage, 70%-80% is good enough