Comment by overfeed
3 days ago
> The bots will eventually be indistinguishable from humans
Not until they get issued government IDs they won't!
Extrapolating from current trends, some form of online ID attestation (likely based on government-issued ID[1]) will become normal in the next decade, and naturally, this will be included in the anti-bot arsenal. It will be up to the site operator to trust identities signed by the Russian government.
1. Despite what Sam Altman's eyeball company will try to sell you, government registers will always be the anchor of trust for proof-of-identity, they've been doing it for centuries and have become good at it and have earned the goodwill.
How does this work, though?
We can't just have "send me a picture of your ID" because that is pointlessly easy to spoof - just copy someone else's ID.
So there must be some verification that you, the person at the keyboard, is the same person as that ID identifies. The UK is rapidly finding out that that is extremely difficult to do reliably. Video doesn't really work reliably on all cases, and still images are too easily spoofed. It's not really surprising, though, because identifying humans reliably is hard even for humans.
If we do it at the network level - like assigning a government-issued network connection to a specific individual, so the system knows that any traffic from a given IP address belongs to that specific individual. There are obvious problems with this model, not least that IP addresses were never designed for this, and spoofing an IP becomes identity theft.
We also do need bot access for things, so there must be some method of granting access to bots.
I think that to make this work, we'd need to re-architect the internet from the ground up. To get there, I don't think we can start from here.
If you're really curious about this, there's a place where people discuss these problems annually: https://internetidentityworkshop.com/
Various things you're not thinking of:
- "The person at the keyboard, is the same person as that ID identifies" is a high expectation, and can probably be avoided—you just need verifiable credentials and you gotta trust they're not spoofed
- Many official government IDs are digital now
- Most architectures for solving this problem involve bundling multiple identity "attestations," so proof of personhood would ultimately be a gradient. (This does, admittedly, seem complicated though ... but World is already doing it, and there are many examples of services where providing additional information confers additional trust. Blue checkmarks to name the most obvious one.)
As for what it might look like to start from the ground up and solve this problem, https://urbit.org/, for all its flaws, is the only serious attempt I know of and proves it's possible in principle, though perhaps not in practice
that is interesting, thanks.
Why isn't it necessary to prove that the person at the keyboard is the person in the ID? That seems like the minimum bar for entry to this problem. Otherwise we can automate the ID checks and the bots can identify as humans no problem.
And how come the UK is failing so badly at this?
We almost all have IC Chip readers in our pocket (our cell phones), so if the government issues a card that has a private key embedded in it, akin to existing GnuPG SmartCards, you can use your phone to sign an attestation of your personhood.
In fact, Japan already has this in the form of "My Number Card". You go to a webpage, the webpage says "scan this QR code, touch your phone to your ID card, and type in your pin code", and doing that is enough to prove the the website that you're a human. You can choose to share name/birthday/address, and it's possible to only share a subset.
Robots do not get issued these cards. The government verifies your human-ness when they issue them. Any site can use this system, not just government sites.
Germany has this. The card plus PIN technically proves you are in current possession of both, not that you are the person (no biometrics or the like). You can chose to share/request not only certain data fields but also eg if you are below or above a certain age or height without disclosing the actual number.
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That is already solved by governments and businesses. If you have recently attempted to log into a US government website, you were probably told that you need Login.gov or ID.me. ID.me verifies identity via driver’s license, passport, Social Security number—and often requires users to take a video selfie, matched against uploaded ID images. If automated checks fail, a “Trusted Referee” video call is offered.
If you think this sounds suspiciously close the what businesses do with KYC, Know Your Customer, you're correct!
Not good enough, providers and governments want proof of life and proof of identity that matches government IDs.
Without that, anyone can pretend to be their dead grandma/murder victim, or someone whose ID they stole.
How about a chip implant signed by the government hospital that attests for your vitality? Looks like this is where things are headed
IDs would have to be reissued with a public/private key model you can use to sign your requests.
> the person at the keyboard, is the same person as that ID identifies
This won't be possible to verify - you could lend your ID out to bots but that would come at the risk of being detected and blanket banned from the internet.
I have a wonderful new idea for this problem space based on your username.
UK is stupidly far behind on this though. On one hand the digitization of government services is really well done(thanks to the fantastic team behind .gov websites), but on the other it's like being in the dark ages of tech. My native country has physical ID cards that contain my personal certificate that I can use to sign things or to - gasp! - prove that I am who I say I am. There is a government app that you can use to scan your ID card using the NFC chip in your phone, after providing it with a password that you set when you got the card it produces a token that can then be used to verify your identy or sign documents digitally - and those signatures legally have the same weight as real paper signatures.
UK is in this weird place where there isn't one kind of ID that everyone has - for most people it's the driving licence, but obviously that's not good enough. But my general point is that UK could just look over at how other countries are doing it and copy good solutions to this problem, instead of whatever nonsense is being done right now with the age verification process being entirely outsourced to private companies.
> UK is in this weird place where there isn't one kind of ID that everyone has - for most people it's the driving licence, but obviously that's not good enough.
As a Brit I personally went through a phase of not really existing — no credit card, no driving licence, expired passport - so I know how annoying this can be.
But it’s worth noting that we have this situation not because of mismanagement or technical illiteracy or incompetence but because of a pretty ingrained (centuries old) political and cultural belief that the police shouldn’t be able to ask you “papers please”. We had ID cards in World War II, everyone found them egregious and they were scrapped. It really will be discussed in those terms each time it is mentioned, and it really does come down to this original aspect of policing by consent.
So the age verification thing is running up against this lack of a pervasive ID, various KYC situations also do, we can get an ID card to satisfy verification for in-person voting if we have no others, but it is not proof of identity anywhere else, etc.
It is frustrating to people who do not have that same cultural touchstone but the “no to ID” attitude is very very normal; generally the UK prefers this idea of contextual, rather than universal ID. It’s a deliberate design choice.
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In Europe we have itsme. You link the phone app to your ID, then you can use it to scan QR codes to log into websites.
"In Europe" is technically true but makes it sound more widely used than I believe it to be... though maybe my knowledge is out of date.
Their website lists 24 supported countries (including some non-EU like UK and Norway, and missing a few of the 27 EU countries) - https://www.itsme-id.com/en-GB/coverage
But does it actually have much use outside of Belgium?
Certainly in the UK I've never come across anyone, government or private business, mentioning it - even since the law passed requiring many sites to verify that visitors are adults. I wouldn't even be familiar with the name if I hadn't learned about its being used in Belgium.
Maybe some other countries are now using it, beyond just Belgium?
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One problem with solutions like that is the the website needs to pay for every log in. So you save a few dollars blocking scrapers but now you have to pay thousands of dollars to this company instead.
Im from europe I never heard about it
In Singapore, we have SingPass, which is also an OpenID Connect implementation.
Officially sanctioned 2fa tied to your official government ID. Over here we have "It's me" [1].
Yes, you can in theory still use your ID card with a usb cardreader for accessing gov services, but good luck finding up to date drivers for your OS or use a mobile etc.
[1] https://www.itsme-id.com/en-BE/
Except that itsme crap is not from the government and doesn't support activation on anything but a Windows / Mac machine. No Linux support at all, while the Belgian government stuff (CSAM) supports Linux just fine.
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I doesn’t require a ground up rework. The easiest idea is real people can get an official online id at some site like login.gov and website operators verify people using that api. Some countries already have this kind of thing from what I understand. The tech bros want to implement this on the blockchain but the government could also do it.
Can't wait to sign into my web browser with my driver's license.
In all likelihood, most people will do so via the Apple Wallet (or the equivalent on their non-Apple devices). It's going to be painful to use Open source OSes for a while, thanks to CloudFlare and Anubis. This is not the future I want, but we can't have nice things.
> This is not the future I want, but we can't have nice things.
Actually, we can if we collectively decide that we should have them. Refuse to use sites that require these technologies and demand governments to solve the issue in better ways, e.g. by ensuring there are legal consequences for abusive corporations.
No worries. Stick an unregistered copy of win 11 (ms doesn’t seem to care) and your drivers license in an isolated VM and let the AI RDP into it for you.
Manually browsing the web yourself will probably be trickier moving forward though.
What's next? Requiring a license to make toast in your own damn toaster?
> your own damn toaster
Silly you, joking around like that. Can you imagine owning a toaster?! Sooo inconvenient and unproductive! Guess, if you change your housing plan, you gonna bring it along like an infectious tick? Hahah — no thank you! :D
You will own nothing and you will be happy!
(Please be reminded, failing behavioral compliance with, and/or voicing disapproval of this important moral precept, jokingly or not, is in violation of your citizenship subscription's general terms and conditions. This incident will be reported. Customer services will assist you within 48 hours. Please, do not leave your base zone until this issue has been resolved to your satisfaction.)
"Luckily" you won't have to do only that, you'll need to provide live video to prove you're the person in the ID and that you're alive.
The internet would come to a grinding halt as everyone would suddenly become mindful of their browsing. It's not hard to imagine a situation where, say, pornhub sells its access data and the next day you get sacked at your teaching job.
It doesn't need to. Thanks to asymmetric cryptography governments can in theory provide you with a way to prove you are a human (or of a certain age) without:
1. the government knowing who you are authenticating yourself to
2. or the recipient learning anything but the fact that you are a human
3. or the recipient being able to link you to a previous session if you authenticate yourself again later
The EU is trying to build such a scheme for online age verification (I'm not sure if their scheme also extends to point 3 though. Probably?).
But I don't get how is goes for spam or scrapping: if I can pass the test "anonymously", then what prevents me from doing it for illegal purposes?
I get it for age verification: it is difficult for a child to get a token that says they are allowed to access porn because adults around them don't want them to access porn (and even though one could sell tokens online, it effectively makes it harder to access porn as a child).
But how does it prevent someone from using their ID to get tokens for their scrapper? If it's anonymous, then there is no risk in doing it, is there?
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There isn't a technical solution to this: governments and providers not only want proof of identity matching IDs, they want proof of life, too.
This will always end with live video of the person requesting to log in to provide proof of life at the very least, and if they're lazy/want more data, they'll tie in their ID verification process to their video pipeline.
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Such schemes have the fatal flaw that they can be trivially abused. All you need are a couple of stolen/sold identities and bots start proving their humanness and adultness to everyone.
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I did think asymmetric cryptography but I assumed the validators would be third parties / individual websites and therefore connections could be made using your public key. But I guess having the government itself provide the authentication service makes more sense.
I wonder if they'd actually honor 1 instead of forcing recipients to be registered, as presumably they'd be interested in tracking user activity.
How would it prevent you from renting your identity out to a bot farm?
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You are right about the negative outcomes that this might have but you have way too much faith in the average person caring enough before it happens to them.
I live with the naïve and optimistic dream that something like that would just show that everyone was in the list so they can't use it to discriminate against people.
> sells its access data
or has it leaked somehow.
Eyeball company play is to be a general identity provider, which is an obvious move for anyone who tries to fill this gap. You can already connect your passport in the World app.
https://world.org/blog/announcements/new-world-id-passport-c...
Note: one of the founders of the World app is Sam Altman.
> some form of online ID attestation (likely based on government-issued ID[1]) will become normal in the next decade
I believe this is likely, and implemented in the right way, I think it will be a good thing.
A zero-knowledge way of attesting persistent pseudonymous identity would solve a lot of problems. If the government doesn’t know who you are attesting to, the service doesn’t know your real identity, services can’t correlate users, and a service always sees the same identity, then this is about as privacy-preserving as you can get with huge upside.
A social media site can ban an abusive user without them being able to simply register a new account. One person cannot operate tens of thousands of bot profiles. Crawlers can be banned once. Spammers can be locked out of email.
> A social media site can ban an abusive user without them being able to simply register a new account.
This is an absolutely gargantuan-sized antifeature that would single-handedly drive me out of the parts of the internet that choose to embrace this hellish tech.
I think social media platforms should have the ability to effectively ban abusive users, and I’m pretty sure that’s a mainstream viewpoint shared by most people.
The alternative is that you think people should be able to use social media platforms in ways that violate their rules, and that the platforms should not be able to refuse service to these users. I don’t think that’s a justifiable position to take, but I’m open to hearing an argument for it. Simply calling it “hellish” isn’t an argument.
And can you clarify if your position accounts for spammers? Because as far as I can see, your position is very clearly “spammers should be allowed to spam”.
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>A zero-knowledge way of attesting persistent pseudonymous identity
why would a government do that though? the alternative is easier and gives it more of what it wants.
The alternative would have far less support from the public.
At this future point, AI firms will simply rent people’s identities to use online.
They are already getting people hooked on "free" access so they will have plenty of subjects willing to do that to keep that access.
And if they are as successful as they are threatening to be, they will have destroyed so many jobs that I am sure they will find a few thousand people across the world who will accept a stipend to loan their essence to the machine.
This has quite nasty consequences for privacy. For this reason, alternatives are desirable. I have less confidence on what such an alternative should be, however.
Can you elaborate on that? Are you implying that it is strictly impossible to do this in a privacy-preserving way?
It depends on your precise requirements and assumptions.
Does your definition of 'privacy-preserving' distrust Google, Apple, Xiaomi, HTC, Honor, Samsung and suchlike?
Do you also distrust third-party clowns like experian and equifax (whose current systems have gaping security holes) and distrust large government IT projects (which are outsourced to clowns like Fujutsu who don't know what they're doing) ??
Do you require it to work on all devices, including outdated phones and tablets; PCs; Linux-only devices; other networked devices like smart lightbulbs; and so on? Does it have to work in places phones aren't allowed, or mobile data/bluetooth isn't available? Does the identity card have to be as thin, flexible, durable and cheap as a credit card, precluding any built-in fingerprint sensors and suchlike?
Does the age validation have to protect against an 18-year-old passing the age check on their 16-year-old friend's account? While also being privacy-preserving enough nobody can tell the two accounts were approved with the same ID card?
Does the system also have to work on websites without user accounts, because who the hell creates a pornhub account anyway?
Does the system need to work without the government approving individual websites' access to the system? Does it also need to be support proving things like name, nationality, and right to work in the country so people can apply for bank accounts and jobs online? And yet does it need to prevent sites from requiring names just for ad targeting purposes?
Do all approvals have to be provable, so every company can prove to the government that the checks were properly carried out at the right time? Does it have to be possible to revoke cards in a timely manner, but without maintaining a huge list of revoked cards, and without every visit to a porn site triggering a call to a government server for a revocation check?
If you want to accomplish all of these goals - you're going to have a tough time.
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I am not implying anything and mean only what I directly said.
More specifically, I do not know if a privacy preserving method exists. This is different from thinking that it doesn't exist.
While the question of "is it actually possible to do this in a privacy preserving way?" is certainly interesting, was there ever a _single_ occasion where a government had the option of doing something in a privacy preserving way, when a non-privacy preserving way was also possible? Politicians would absolutely kill for the idea of unmasking dissenters on internet forums. Even if the option is a possibility, they are deliberately not going to implement it.
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Fun fact: The Norwegian wine monopoly is rolling out exactly this to prevent scalpers buying up new releases. Each online release will require a signup in advance with a verified account.
Eh? With the "anonymous" models that we're pushing for right now, nothing stops you from handing over your verification token (or the control of your browser) to a robot for a fee. The token issued by the verifier just says "yep, that's an adult human", not "this is John Doe, living at 123 Main St, Somewhere, USA". If it's burned, you can get a new one.
If we move to a model where the token is permanently tied to your identity, there might be an incentive for you not to risk your token being added to a blocklist. But there's no shortage of people who need a bit of extra cash and for whom it's not a bad trade. So there will be a nearly-endless supply of "burner" tokens for use by trolls, scammers, evil crawlers, etc.
If it's illegal that person could face legal consequences
They... stole it from me?
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Can't wait to start my stolen id as a service for the botnets