Comment by cesarb

In the modern political environment, everyone should be worried about that.

Right, this is just a variation on "If you have nothing to hide..."

ETA: You're not wrong; folk who have specific, legitimate opsec concerns shouldn't be using certain tools. I just initially read your post a certain way. Apologies if it feels like I put words in your mouth.

Because all cops are honest, all warrants are lawful and nothing worrying happens in the land of freedom right now.

Appeal to the law fallacy.

That makes it vanishingly unlikely. On a 16GB RAM computer with that rate, you can expect 64 random bit flips per month.

So roughly you could expect this happen roughly once every two hundred million years.

Assuming there are about 2 billion Windows computers in use, that’s about 10 computers a year that experience this bit flip.

Rounding that to 1 error per 30 days per 256M, for 16G of RAM that would translate to 1 error roughly every half a day. I do not believe that at all, having done memory testing runs for much longer on much larger amounts of RAM. I've seen the error counters on servers with ECC RAM, which remain at 0 for many months; and when they start increasing, it's because something is failing and needs replaced. In my experience RAM failures are much rarer than for HDDs and SSDs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aT7mnSstKGs

Was in DEFCON19.

A very old game speedrun -- of the era that speedruns weren't really a "thing" like they are today -- apparently greatly benefited from a hardware bit flip, and it was only recently discovered.

Can't find an explanatory video though :(

At the time Google was taking RAM that had failed manufacturer QA that they had gotten for cheap and sticking it on DIMMs themselves and trying to self certify them.

> At google "more than 8% of DIMM memory modules were affected by errors per year"

That's all errors including permanent hardware failure, not just transient bit flips or from cosmic rays.

Happens all the time, in reality (even on the darkside). When the atmosphere fails (again, happening all the time), error correction usually handles the errant bits.

Especially since HN readers are more likely to be using ECC memory

if cosmic ray bit flips were so rare then ecc ram wouldn't be a thing.

You're right, it's less intrusive than uploading your files directly, like a backup does.

The part where you're asking me about the phrase when it's not been used anywhere in this thread prior to your comment.

I don't think that's quite right. The age-gating of the internet is part of a brand new push, it's not just patching up a hole in an existing framework. At least in my Western country, all age-verified activities were things that could've put someone in direct, obvious danger - drugs, guns, licensing for something that could be dangerous, and so on. In the past, the 'control' of things that were just information was illusory. Movie theaters have policies not to let kids see high-rated movies, but they're not strictly legally required to do so. Video game stores may be bound by agreements or policy not to sell certain games to children, but these barriers were self-imposed, not driven by law. Pornography has really been the only exception I can think of. So, demanding age verification to be able to access large swaths of the internet (in some cases including things as broad as social media, and similar) is a huge expansion on what was in the past, instead of just them closing up some loopholes.

The problem is the implementation is hasty.

When I go buy a beer at the gas station, all I do is show my ID to the cashier. They look at it to verify DOB and then that's it. No information is stored permanently in some database that's going to get hacked and leaked.

We can't trust every private company that now has to verify age to not store that information with whatever questionable security.

If we aren't going to do a national registry that services can query to get back only a "yes or no" on whether a user is of age or not, then we need regulation to prevent the storage of ID information.

We should still be able to verify age while remaining psuedo-anonymous.

The problem is that there is nothing done to protect privacy.

There is already plenty of entities that not only have reliable way of proving it's you that have access to account, but also enough info to return user's age without disclosing anything else, like banks or govt sites, they could (or better, be forced to) provide interface to that data.

Basically "pick your identity provider" -> "auth on their site" -> "step showing that only age will be shared" -> response with user's age and the query's unique ID that's not related to the user account id