Posted by audiodude 4 hours ago
> You can change a password. You cannot change your face.
> This is not a popularity contest, and refusal is not a vote you are trying to win
These were a couple sentences that were immediate flags to me. There've been countless articles written on this (I can dig them up if you want), but IMO there are pretty clear semantic rhythms you start to notice.
It is not foo, it is bar. You can zip, you cannot zap.
Surely you’re aware that LLMs were trained on the ways humans write specifically to mimic them? Yes? So what’s the gripe? Someone cranked out a “thought piece” with no effort or actual thinking on their own?
But thats the promise of AI.
So are you advocating doing away with AI tools and research? Maybe we start asking “should we” not “can we”? Now that is a position I might get behind.
But really how the hell am I supposed to write at all when nearly ANYTHING I write could be interpreted as AI-generated and then shouted down in some quasi-ad-hominem attack on me while not engaging with any points made?
It is the utter end of written discussion.
Just read a few fiction books written in 2026 in Amazon Kindle Unlimited. Your brain will be trained to recognize AI-Slop Speak in No Time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:AISIGNS
https://github.com/blader/humanizer/blob/main/SKILL.md#conte...
I'm guessing a huge number of people never even bother to click on the article and just comment based on the title, so there's that. Then there's cases where they are sympathetic to the subject or opinion and talk about that in the comments and ignore that the machine-written article doesn't actually contribute to the conversation at all.
> A verification regime does not need your approval — it needs your participation
Ugh
They wanted to scan my face, and in a moment of weakness, I performed the ritual. Thirty seconds later, they suspended my account due to violations of their terms of service: "this decision cannot be appealed". So now they have my face and I still can't use the marketplace.
I can only assume I'm suspended due to the behavior of somebody who tried to use my identity for something during the decade when I had no facebook account. Apparently not even my face is strong enough authentication for me to convince them that I'm not whoever it was that caused whatever the problem was.
This is why biometrics will never make sense. They're too immutable. Maintaining multiple accounts is not a bug, it's a debugging mechanism. Since I have only the face that I do, I can't even figure out why I'm banned.
We need to instead stop trusting people merely because they have an account. 10k upvotes/likes/5-star-reviews should mean nothing if I don't explicitly or transitively trust the upvoters/likers/reviewers. We have to build things that make decisions by traversing the trust graph so instead of being banned with no recourse, I can create a no-trust identity and elevate it back to personhood status by convincing my meatspace friends to trust it by having a conversation with them in meatspace.
I signed on for Meta enhanced support for a month (nb, don't bother doing this, it's a waste of money) and had numerous voice calls with pandering support people who assured me it had nothing to do with identity and everything to do with vague "Community Standards violations" that can't be identified. FWIW the restrictions are indefinite and can't be appealed.
FB is set up like it's based on the film "Brazil" mated with Sartre's "No Exit."
I don't really care about facebook, I found a buyer for the thing. I'm just saying that the use of biometrics is bad engineering because it amplifies the severity of adjacent bugs to "blocker". Starting over with a new identity should be painful enough to discourage bad behavior, but it should be possible to enable users who do strange things sometimes to navigate the system.
They all prompt for the same information to do the same job.
You are required to make one of these “pages” to be able to advertise on any Meta property.
None of them work, and they have non-functional error handling. And if you keep trying, getting zero feedback about what’s wrong, you get the “scan your face and give us your biometric data” wall.
As such I cannot advertise on Instagram. Like, I can’t give them money, even when I try. It’s impossible that I’m the only one in the world, and it’s costing them money. Directly.
You would think that with their infinite AI resources they would be able to recognize problems, identify the source, and unfuck themselves… right?
In days, not years… right?
At least that’s what we’re told. But it seems reality doesn’t quite agree.
Google Ads is ghosting me too. I really could get behind legislation that requires companies to have a human point of contact in these cases, but I guess a private company has the right to ignore people they don’t want as customers.
but I guess a private company has the right to ignore people they don’t want
as customers.
Edit: Oh, also comments on reddit r/$cityname recommending a local business are quite useful/effective. They might be botted to hell at this point, but I've never had a bad experience.
...who the hell buys anything from Facebook ads? I never have, no-one I know ever has. Is my bubble seriously that strong?
I admit, I do click on Facebook ads every so often. This likely means Meta gets paid, and also some number somewhere goes up which means I get shown more of the kind of things I click on. This is how I end up seeing adverts for hi-vis vests for poultry, radioactive pendants (sturdy titanium, reliably glows for 25 years!), tungsten cubes and so on; because I see them and I think "what the actual..." and I click, because you can comment on Facebook adverts and maybe there is some kind of sanity to be found; and, as expected, the comments are full of confused people saying "what the actual..." none of whom are any more likely to buy the product than me.
Has anyone here, but especially of the people considering using Facebook to advertise their product/service, ever bought anything from a Facebook ad? What was it?
Craiglist has served me well in the past.
Found the guy who's never heard of "shadow profiles."
Facebook seems to have the lowest cost cars, but it also seems to be the least successful way of contacting people. When I bought a car for my sister in April, I contacted (no exaggeration) 70+ sellers and heard back from about ten of them. And yes, I changed the default "Is it still available?" message to something demonstrating urgency e.g. "I have cash and would like to buy." But with persistence, I found her the right car through Marketplace. Really hate the FBook search interface though, it's total garbage.
I spend most of my time looking on CList and OfferUp.
It is obvious something is broken but they are quite good at blocking you from accessing any possible avenue of support once the account is in this state.
On the off chance someone from Meta is reading: Please unban the account "rareboc" :-)
Caved, tried to sign up, asked for my face, then rejected me forever.
It isn't that biometrics might never make sense but when it comes to Facebook? He's a black hat hacker who deserves prison
Mark has an absolute majority of shares at Meta at around 61% [0]. It is literally impossible for the board or other shareholders to cause him to do anything he doesn't want to do or to make him work in the best interests of others, whether they be other shareholders or the public. Meta is more-or-less a sole proprietorship with window dressing.
If no one can force a company to change by anything short of a person's passing or their loss of interest, then it's not really governed, and cannot be trusted to operate within the market and society at large. We need to make these organizations accountable to others in the systems in which they participate.
[0] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/insights/082216/top-9-...
And that is the real shame. Because I don't want to have to give my face or do age verification but I know when the time comes, and If I need to use a service now, I will give them whatever they want to get past the hurdle and use the service. It sucks, but I don't think a petition will help. Unless of course you get the 50 million to sign the petition AND stick to it.
I’m on Insta and WhatsApp and I use them a few times per year. I’m on Messenger and have seen a dramatic dropoff in messages. I’m on FB frequently and notice only a small fraction of my friends bother anymore and it’s become an interest platform to make up the lack, so I’m trending toward less time there. I’m on Twitter/X but check in maybe once a month.
I may not be a typical user, but I’m probably not unique either.
Threads is the new time sink and a lot of times I open it and close it shortly thereafter because it's all the same...someone with a 20 part diatribe, someone repeating the news, someone telling you to be outraged, engagement bait.
Revenue is up 33% year over year. Not sure how that is sustainable.
For 15+ years, I've thought long and hard countless times about what could sustainably replace social media platforms that do not serve us well. I know a paid app is not super likely to succeed, although WhatsApp did use to cost a dollar! It seems like a nonprofit wouldn't be that great, and so I wonder about a mission-driven public benefit corporation (not to be confused with a B corp, though it could be one of those too). Of course it has to be cool or no one would use it. Not a fuddy duddy wannabe social network. Anyway, to sustain itself, would ads or paid offerings (that don't harvest personal data) be successful?
Happy to discuss with anyone interested!
Probably something of a demographic (geography/age) thing.
These mainstream services no longer provide what people signed up for: life updates, pictures of kids and dogs, etc. These value-add posts are becoming less frequent because of/and are being replaced by streams of posts from people _you should follow_ or content they're pretty sure will rile you up about ... whatever. Generally, the people who are still active and whose posts slip through (because it's their only outlet) are effectively monkeys slinging shit (e.g. uncles posting AI slop memes about Barack Obama's suits).
It seems like younger generations have moved on to more silo'd experiences. I don't use TikTok but it's my understanding that it's more about connecting with people who share common interests (more akin to HN or Reddit) and not as much about connecting with your high school Spanish teacher who has gone full MAGA and whose posts you don't care to see and/or who you don't want seeing your posts and trolling you in the comments. This same cohort also seems to be spending much more time in private group chats and, for the most part, the platform doesn't seem to matter; it's just a message broker.
Concept of SNS changed from “audience of my friends and acquaintances” to “audience of potentially anyone in the world” around 2017ish, when every feed became algo-feed. And users like it, because it is akin to “endless Reddit scrolling”, but more tailored to things you might find interesting. And posters like it too, because of potential reach and attention.
Instagram Reels has 2B+ monthly users. Even if we say 50% are bots, not active and etc., that’s still roughly 1B users. It really tracks if you stand up on a busy subway train, almost in any city, and just look around. You’ll see full screens of TikTok, IG, YouTube shorts. The younger generation’s “private group chats” aren’t some sort of replacement to endless scrolling. A good chunk of messages are links to posts in one of those platforms.
"Need" is an extremely strong word that is not appropriate for many Internet services where facial recognition is being pushed for.
In other words I think the people pushing these kinds of "identification" methods would love you for spreading their silent message of this being unavoidable knowingly or unknowingly.
Even if what you say is correct let's not make it easier for people wanting to enshittify the future, yeah?
If you already agree the resistance will ultimately lead nowhere, why not focus that energy on something with a better chance of success? Best guess would be partnering with someone like the EFF for a solution through lobbying And the courts.
Cynicism is an assumption. Cynicism is emotional armor because the thought of caring again and the risk of it not panning out is more painful than not caring at all.
The only rational aspect of cynicism is that it makes you feel better. It isn't relevant about one's actual ability to change the world.
If efforts in the past didn't work to affect political change? Change what you do. Change your tactics. Clearly many groups - including ones with little-to-no-money - can and do succeed to influence policy on a regular basis.
The worst thing you can do is to convince others not to do anything about it. And right after that is to do nothing about it yourself.
If everyone thinks so, then surely yes, but if people realize, that change starts in the small and they can be part of the change, perhaps at some personal cost, but that it might be worth it, then suddenly change is possible.
Even in the replies someone tries to appeal to some ideal of „rationalism“ which is nothing but defeatism to the status quo. They see any kind of passion, emotion or values as „irrational“ and categorically as something lesser.
But what is reason without values? Logic without axioms? Just treading in the trivial waters.
For most people, it's not realistic to give up their social bonds, they are too far in. If you are hoping for some revolution or change in this aspect is way too late. You can have small fringe groups engaging in this, but at the end of the day you are overestimating how many people actually give a shit.
I don't see myself as admitting defeat here. I'm choosing my battles. The gov here will drive this through as we're stuck with them until 2029. I'm considering (with a heavy heart) to leave the UK and this is just one nail in a coffin full of nails.
Regardless, no matter where you are (besides China or Russia) you’re at least partially subject to USA jurisdiction as demonstrated by their Executive Order 14203 which implemented asset freezes and travel bans on ICC officials, judges, and prosecutors — effectively unilaterally “de-banking” EU bureaucrats over the objections of the EU.
https://courthousenews.com/cut-off-by-their-banks-and-even-i...
I mean I will just not use the service and I'll seek out alternatives that are open source or create my own. I'll do anything possible until I'm the last one standing if that's what it comes down too.
I tried to sign up to Telnyx and they had the same crap from an unreliable data-breach and being-litigated persona identifier. I passed on that.
I've already been going down this road as I've abandoned Google and some of the big cloud providers in favor of smaller companies who aren't pushing these policies.
It isn't hard to click cancel. It's just people favor convenience over their own freedom because they have never experienced not having freedom like our founder's did 250 years ago. The problem is once freedom is gone, getting it back requires blood spilled and political reforms and revolutions based on what history teaches us.
We are currently ruled by the third generation of post-WW2 five eyes nepo kids, with all problems this entails. The feel-good narrative about US was spun by Hollywood, but the old money of British aristocracy never went away. All the "self-made billionaires" who receive a Lordship title from the King just so the commoners work even more because they think they have a fair shot.
If someone like Ghislaine Maxwell applies for a visa in their colony USA, she receives a vanity social security number "Leet Babe" (1337 84883).
You don't need 50 million people to do that.
Need or want? We need very few of the services looking for our government ID. Also, this should not be the only way of pushing back. We can support the EFF and politicians who are actively fighting against this or candidates who vow to. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/03/rep-finke-was-right-ag...
Why? Why not just hold firm to your principles and sacrifice convenience for your personal sovereignty. When you don't, you make the situation worse for everyone else as well by normalizing this bullshit.
They want to force all operating systems to require age sniffing. That's the main angle right now. I am curiously watching how systemd will add more implementation details to this; probably as a first step only for commercial linux distributions.
The worst part is these are all stupid poorly thought out band-aid solutions to "protect the kids" from platforms that are also detrimental to adults.
Holy fuck, man, visiting that with a HN referer serves up a rather NSFW rude image, and evidently sets a cookie to make sure it happens next time too.
replacement link: https://web.archive.org/web/20260401175031/https://www.jwz.o...
https://groups.google.com/g/linux.debian.bugs.dist/c/ItL6xJm...
Instead, its strategy has become to advocate for increasing the net levels of tracking and regulatory burden, so long as it is positioned to burden other parts of the technology stack (namely, app stores and operating systems) rather than their social networks.
From the link from a sibling commenter: https://web.archive.org/web/20260429210901/https://tboteproj...
> Meta spent a record $26.3 million on federal lobbying in 2025, deployed 86+ lobbyists across 45 states, and covertly funded a group called the Digital Childhood Alliance (DCA) to advocate for the App Store Accountability Act (ASAA).
The irony that their namesake Metaverse was meant to be, itself, an operating system and app distribution platform is palpable. When ambitions shift to regulatory capture, a shark has arguably been jumped.
Ad companies are data collection companies.
The assumption is you have to control people to enforce laws. They keep pushing this notion that is a requirement to keep people safe. That somehow if we have big brother AI surveillance everyone will be on their best behavior.
Oracle, Palantir, Meta, and other mega billionaires push this agenda because who is going to stop them from controlling society and getting absurdly powerful and wealthy from it?
There are always claims that is a shadowy cabal of world leaders coordinating in secret or that a specific corporation is lobbying to do it all, but the fact is that ID checking is oddly popular in theory to a lot of people who haven’t thought through the consequences. Check any thread on this topic on Hacker News where the idea is discussed in a way that makes it feel like it’s only for kids or only for Facebook and there’s a huge outpouring of support for the idea.
The topic only becomes unpopular when the actual consequences become apparent. For the Hacker News audience the popularity of these ideas does a complete U-turn as soon as the concept of ID checking extends to platforms we might use, like Reddit, Discord, or YouTube. When commenters think it’s only going to impact Facebook and TikTok they welcome ID checking laws with enthusiastic support.
Tiktok? I remember when people were freaking out about porn games on the Atari 2600.
Edit: by "data" I mean only the screencapture of the Atari 2600 output at some point in time.
Lobbyists do not just try to convince a politician that X is a good idea. Lobbyists give the politician money to introduce already drafted legislation, and then give other politicians money to support it. And if they can get the legislation passed in one place, they'll try it again.
The result is that suspiciously similar legislation appears in many places close in time, due to it being pushed by particular interests.
What bothers me most isn't their corruption, but their apparent belief that it won't eventually affect them or their families - perhaps sooner than they think.
AI coming along is another “great opportunity” to try and force these programs
I don't know if the ruled can really do anything. All these countries, even if they are poorer on paper, are still nation-level actors with power that regular people can't even dream of matching.
But it's not a question of poor execution -- there is simply no way to execute this. There is no way to achieve the goal (age-restricting websites) without identity verification. There are any number of half solutions that will solve 80% of the problem, but to move the needle past that requires identity verification. Even then, as the article points out, we only move to 90%.
You probably have seen them if you live in the US, and had little idea about them.
It happens at the national level too. I just did a simple Google search for "united nations committee to harmonize" [1] (no quotes in my search itself) and I count 5 or 6 committees explicitly dedicated to "harmonization" in the first ten results. And that's just the committees, you can count on each of them to have factions within (because politics, politics never changes) and outside forces competing and vying to get the "harmonizations" to favor them and disfavor their competitors. And as politics, politics never changes, paging Ron Perlman, these harmonization committees are unlikely to flinch away from "harmonizing" entirely new rules into existence... which, again, with not all that much searching you can easily find examples of them stating outright.
And the forces trying to influence those committees, are not all just sitting out in the public with some .org website with their true mission stated clearly above the fold. And I just use these UN committees, which are themselves literally the result of one search and a few seconds scrolling through the search page and anything but a complete list, as plain and obvious public examples operating in public for at least nominally good purposes. Nothing stops anyone from buying politicians in multiple countries at a time to push through something like age verification directly, without being open about who they are.
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=united+nations+committ...
It is most repellent, I think, to people who genuinely hold the belief ("I want to prevent minors from using websites that are generally agreed to be harmful to minors"). When you tell these people "no, you actually want a totalitarian state that controls what adults are allowed to believe", they think you're crazy, because they don't believe this.
That this is an inevitable consequence of the solution to the problem that they want to solve is a question of tradeoffs that people are not generally aware of, and I think it's way more important for people to be aware of those tradeoffs without being told that it is the illuminati and the freemasons and George Soros and Fox News trying to Orwell their way into a global police state.
"Why now" I think is pretty obvious -- the age limitations that exist currently are easily circumvented, but have given enough of a plausible deniability aspect that politicians have been able to skate by. There has been increasing research and media dedicated to the idea that there are aspects of the internet which we should be shielding children from. While many of this research is dubious, there's a rising moral panic around it.
The core of the problem is that there is no possible implementation of age verification that does not also require identity verification. In this I am in strong agreement with the article, but the use of paranoid and dramatic language as in this article only alienates people who find the conspiratorial tone to be reverse polarizing.
This would be fine if it was actually done perfectly - ie. Devices get a signed ticket from the government identity provider, device can provides a cryptographically verifiable ticket to the site that its a valid identity and their age is within the $x age range but not tied to the user’s actual identity / document, and the device doesn’t ask the government identity provider to mint a new ticket each time it needs to attest (maybe 500 tickets are minted at a time and you auto renew 500 more each month)
However the likelihood of this actually being done correctly is slim to none.
But obviously this doesn't "solve the problem". It's another bandaid with an extensive list of failure modes and tradeoffs. It falls into the class of "the age limitations that exist currently are easily circumvented" type of solution.
In my opinion it is fine to leave it there and accept the tradeoffs. We could mandate better website marking, and mandate better device or app-level mechanisms, and improve monitoring and restricting tools, or we could do even less and keep it more or less heterogenous.
But I do not agree that it is "moatism" to talk about it on the website side. There is a real and genuine desire to actually have the kinds of age restrictions that are only possible with strong user identity broadly deployed. Refusing to engage because of imputation of malign motives on the other party's part is not going to persuade anyone, especially if they do not personally have those malign motives.
Collecting user biometric data and trying it to a nominally anonymous user identity is not required here.
This is 100% 'won't someone please think of the children' pearl clutching to hide what's actually going on - furthering control of the online exchange of ideas.
Facebook was never allowed to let in kids under 13. It's now only being enforced.
Only trust fund nepo kids from old money are allowed to have vanity social security numbers, multiple identities and scrubbed Wikipedia articles. The plebeians shall have only a single ID and use it to authenticate with every website.
I really want to know who else has a SSN starting with 1337.
The most proximate domino was the Australian social media ban. Australia was already a country known to experiment with ways to deal with social media - see the news fee they imposed on platforms.
Behind that was the build up of negative outcomes from social media for kids, and adults.
The harms are not something I tend to find actively discussed on HN; I assume because more people are interested in building the next thing, not digging into the trust and safety details.
Customer safety and support are also not going to get anyone promoted in tech. These are cost centers and will often stand in the way of addictive design.
Meta executives were nailed precisely for greenlighting designs their own teams told them were harmful for teens.
At the same time, there is lobbying going on by these firms, to push the burden of verification to someone else.
However, the degree of harm being caused by social media meant we were always going to see voter backlash.
Define actively. They are discussed often. In discussions of age restrictions especially.
I work in the safety side of things, and I've seen the difference in conversations in comment threads here.
Now we’re catching up and realizing how bad it is.
For a similar case, see tasers in Canada after a handcuffed immigrant was killed by one. The question came up “how were tasers certified safe for humans?”. The answer was “they weren’t. A private company just started selling them to police forces who just started using them.”
I don't know why but governments, nearly worldwide, all teaming up on x continents to push the exact same narrative is recent but not totally new: remember the "masks do not work against SaRS-COV-2" to only then lock us all up and then force people to wear face masks?
Media all pushing the "if you believe it possibly can be a lab-leak, you're just as nuts as conspiracy theorists who believe the moon landing was faked" was honestly quite scary to witness too.
And the speed at which virtually everybody, including on HN, started to then push for that propaganda was quite scary too.
For the record, the report mandated (under Biden) by US Congress concludes that the virus has non-zootropic features and the biggest "expert" on the matter, Peter Daszak, has been debarred and cannot ever again receive funding from the US to work on gain-of-function research on viruses.
I stand my case: the "you're a conspiracy nut if you believe the virus could be man-made" was a coordinated setup.
You're asking why, now, they're teaming up to require face verification.
I'm asking why they all sang the same fake tunes about Covid-19 / SaRS-COV2: "Masks do not work" was repeated worldwide, to then forcing us to wear masks was a lie (one of the two was a complete lie).
And of course the incessant propaganda machine, hard at work, to explain everywhere that it couldn't possibly have leaked from a lab tied to Peter Daszak's research doing gain-of-function research on bat viruses, in the very FUCKING CITY, where it all started, was a gigantic lie.
The absolute worst in all of this is the people believing the lies even when the evidence is right in front of their eyes.
I kept posting here on HN back then about how it was folly to not open your eyes and make your mind work two seconds and I posted about that one independent journalist who found the Peter Daszak link very early on and fought for the truth. But the herds, worldwide, were way too pleased to buy the governments' lies.
Years after the fact we got proven the governments, worldwide, lied and teamed up to hide the truth.
"Despite congressional mandates requiring the declassification of COVID-origin intelligence under both the 2023 law and last year’s National Defense Authorization Act of 2026, substantial portions of the newly released records remain blacked out."
The CIA stated they now believe it's a lab leak.
Oh really?
https://www.whitehouse.gov/lab-leak-true-origins-of-covid-19...
This, like Goebbels' propaganda technique in nazi Germany, should be studied for years and years: how Goebbels' techniques were used, worldwide, to try to hide the governments' responsibilities in the countless deaths resulting from the virus they funded.
It's the same, worldwide-coordinated, "think of the humans" propaganda they're using for face ID.
Because there are actors pushing for this. And they let money flow, so the lobbyists work.
People think lobbyists don't do this? Well:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qatar_corruption_scandal_at_th...
These lobbyists were dumb. You can be certain that some lobbyists are so efficient that detecting them reliably is very difficult. Even more so when private media is controlled by a few billionaires who are "in" on the system.
Tor is not for criminals. It's for you and me. And happens to be good enough that criminals use it too. This is the two sided nature of technology.
Tor is a networks of peers across the globe volunteering their network bandwidth to support people under oppression by their government.
The amount of privacy that can be gained from tor is proportional to the amount of people using it. The more that people utilize the technology, the more that everyone looks the same, and protects the people that need it the most.
Tor enables me to say no to these things and carry on, without permission.
BGP attacks are largely defeated by onionservices.
And while governments have the ability to create exit nodes, so does anybody.
as far as i am aware, no one has been caught due to something technical in relation to tor.
it's always something dumb like logging into an email that has the person's real name in it, using a credit card, leaving javascript on, or otherwise making some opsec failure.
"Reading the criminal complaint, it seems that the FBI got itself a list of Harvard users that accessed the Tor network, and went through them one by one to find the one who sent the threat,"
And to be fair, tor comes at the price of speed. But convince isn't the only thing in the math equation here. Privacy basically boils down to a three part equation these days with the variables being Speed/Convenience.
A lot of that speed and convince can be made up for with being familiar with the tools and adapting to a new norm. The actual network speed isn't really that bad comparatively.
If you can master what it takes to design and run your site on localhost....you are literally one step away from sharing it with anyone on the planet who has internet access for zero dollars because of the power of tor, and the global network that supports it.
The reality is, there is no gate there, just the knowledge of how to do it.
Tor is first and foremost a router.
Sites that block tor IP's do happen, this is because of the dual use nature of the technology. Its also well suited for abuse.
The binaries do not discriminate.
No. Tor is for the CIA. It won't work for them unless we use it as well. Criminals also find it useful.
It's easy to verify this. Tor was originally written by Paul Syverson, Michael G. Reed, and David Goldschlag. While all three were working at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory.
I encourage everyone to learn about the origins. Even study these people and what they have said in the past. Don't for get https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Mathewson.
So some organization could release Yubikeys with a certain private key and distribute them in stores that allow only adult customers - like liquor stores or sex shops. Owning a key proves that one is adult without disclosing identity. Keys support USB and bluetooth and can be easily supported on any device.
Also, OS developers should implement simple parent mode - such that parents only need to flip a switch and set a password, and do not have to whitelist apps or websites - the OS should use government-provided lists. You might not like the government, but 99% of parents do not want to bother compiling white lists manually.
>Here kid, take my key, go get me some beer.
Everyone everywhere gets forced to deal with bullshit, then the people it is supposed to be protecting circumvent it directly.
If we tie the person's identity to the token (THIS IS A BAD IDEA) then if underage use is detected, the adult who sold the token can be prosecuted for selling adult tokens to minors.
The core point is that it isn't my responsiblity to take care of your children. When less than half of millennials (40% men, 55% women) have children, the "think of the children" catchphrase really starts to fall flat. Why should I think of the children? I don't even have children. It's the parents' problem, not mine. Stop making it my problem.
Although, pointing out how actual age verification would work won't hurt. It helps to make it more clear that these pending laws are draconian.
Somewhere on the IRS website I had found buried in an article that if they can't submit my refund via direct deposit after some period of time, they are supposed to mail me a physical check. Yet so far, nada.
It's not great, but it's not what the original poster is against.
Name the physical places that would accept a plain government document that says only that you are over eighteen and nothing else? None will, not because 'age was never the point', or because every bar or casino is stealing your face - but because a plain document doesn't offer any proof you are it's owner. Photo ID has been standard as age verification because it's the best way to prove the official ID actually links to the person holding it.
There are more concerns in a digital world with giving your ID / face, but the idea that the demand for photo ID proves it's all a big data grab not remotely about age is a conclusion looking for evidence.
(Plus they acknowledge some sites have done age verification where all they want is your face to confirm you look over 18 - which they then ignore, claiming it's all really a ploy to get your documents. So why isn't the site 'Never give them your documents'?)
In the face of government hostility, at least we here can make more tools like Signal or at least choose not to feed customer data to the beast.
And the other thing is, you can use a gun to murder people. If you try to use a porn site to murder someone, you're fundamentally hitting them with a laptop.
A major reason nobody can think clearly about this anymore is that there are people out there that genuinely believe porn sites and social media are as dangerous to human health as assault rifles and cigarettes. I'm almost as disturbed that people can't differentiate between harm risks as I am about horrible internet age checking laws.