Comment by inetknght
1 day ago
Age verification is merely the background task to set up infrastructure for OS to provide many many other signals about who's using the device.
Age signals from the OS? Need to provide a channel of information available to applications. Applications already talk to servers with unchecked commonality.
Biometric data? Today it unlocks your private key. Tomorrow it's used to verify you are the same person that was used during sign-up -- the same that was "age-verified".
Next year, the application needs to "double-check" your identity. That missile that's coming to you? Definitely not AI-controlled, definitely not coming to destroy the "verified" person who posted a threatening comment about the AI system's god complex. Nope, it's coming to deliver freedom verification.
Nobody stops the government from sending goons to your door right now for a snarky comment. Some govts in fact do it today. It is also cheaper than ai rocket and more precise too
Goons don't scale well. Wide-scale intimidation does.
In a sense, surveillance is a multiplier on your goons, creating virtual goons. If you have 5 goons but you can send them directly to the house of people who disagree with the government with 99% accuracy, it's like you had 500 goons waiting outside 500 houses then only entering the ones where people disagree with the government.
Goons work MUCH better than rockets for intimidation, and actually scale much better.
Rocket is obvious and spectacular. Those are for amateurs.
A journalist got beaten up to the brink of death and will never walk again by 'unknown perpetrators'? Well, it's a dangerous country, and he had it coming, maybe some concerned citizens went a bit too far, but our dear leader cannot watch over everybody.
Scaling: do you think other journalists will not take notice?
And he will still be alive to reminder them how they may end up.
If you want to see how far imagination can go here, look up Artyom Kamardin and think how would you behave after hearing his story .
Goons are bad publicity. Doing your dirty stuff as hidden from view as possible is best option
Its called police. And they scale extraordinarily well.
And turns out power-tripping men offered raw power over other humans on threat of violence is something they like.
And ICE? Remember J6 and Three Percenter's and all those right wing militias? They ended up in ICE. Same reasons.
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Cost kind of stops the government from sending goons right now, sure some governments do it but, it's costly at scale.
The UK gov has shown to be incredibly efficient at arresting and imprisoning citizens for social media comments.
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Missiles are a lot more expensive and much less reusable than goons though. If the nation state can’t afford the goons, it can’t afford to missile you either
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The cost effectiveness is the intimidation and chilling effects on a wider population, when that can be achieved with a small number of actual goons.
The OP's point can be understood as an automization and mechanization of such targeting. Which will be necessary if the scope of thoughtcrime prosecution is to expand
> It is also cheaper than ai rocket and more precise too
Never stopped people overengineering :P
Wasn’t ICE pretty much doing exactly that with no oversight or accountability?
Who needs rockets when you have autonomous mini drones
But you don't have autonomous mini drones, only the leader of the free world does.
Stop justifying more horrible stuff with "there is already some horrible stuff"
The government already does that. The only challenge is scale.
You're being silly, the missile thing was hyperbole. Your computer will direct the thugs to your door.
> Nobody stops the government from sending goons to your door right now for a snarky comment.
This is just dumb. They literally don't know who wrote it, and have to assign somebody to track you down. The fact that they're putting infrastructure on your computer and on the network to make this one click away for them matters.
The goons are. Almost no government can create goons that are submissive enough to comply with any kind of crazy order.
Are you living under a rock?
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Not just governments, though.
I've wondered if FaceID and the Android counterpart are actively creating an extraordinary labeled dataset for facial expressions at the point of sale.
With users trained to scan their face before every transaction, tech companies could correlate transactions to facial expressions, facial expressions to emotions, and emotions to device content. I can imagine algorithms that subtly curate the user experience, selectively showing notifications, content, advertising to coax users towards "retail therapy".
Any webconferencing app on iOS probably fires up the TrueDepth camera to power background replacement and could conceivably do that, albeit not so responsively. Recommend heading to your provider and opting out of share-or-sell if you can.
Also keep in mind keystroke dynamics can probably do that too and has been a topic of study in one form or another since the nineteenth century vis-a-vis telegraph operators.
The application has access to your entire home folder, isn't that enough information?
“This isn’t freedom, this is fear”
Cpt America in the Winter Soldier
Indeed. They hate us for our freedoms.
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Buddy... I've been called a robot since long before AI became mainstream.
Ha! We should have a T shirt with this.
>Age signals from the OS? Need to provide a channel of information available to applications. Applications already talk to servers with unchecked commonality.
This is a non-issue because it's almost certainly going to be gated behind a permission prompt. There are more invasive things sites/apps can ask for, and we seem to be doing fine, eg. location. Moreover is it really that much of a privacy loss if you go on steam, it asks you to verify you're over 18, and the OS says you're actually over 18?
>Biometric data? Today it unlocks your private key. Tomorrow it's used to verify you are the same person that was used during sign-up -- the same that was "age-verified".
Given touch id was introduced over a decade ago, and the associated doom-mongering predilections did not come to pass, I think it's fair to conclude it's a dud.
> permission prompt
Watch as apps refuse to work when you deny them permission. Also the OS (and “privileged apps”) don’t ask for permission, they have full unfettered access to everything already.
>Also the OS (and “privileged apps”) don’t ask for permission, they have full unfettered access to everything already.
If you can't trust the OS, you have bigger issues than it knowing whether you're 18 or not. At the very least it has a camera pointed at you at all moments you're using it, and can eavesdrop in all your conversations.
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> This is a non-issue because it's almost certainly going to be gated behind a permission prompt.
lol.
> Moreover is it really that much of a privacy loss if you go on steam, it asks you to verify you're over 18, and the OS says you're actually over 18?
Slippery slope, but an interesting argument. While SteamOS is a thing, Steam isn't my OS.
> Given touch id was introduced over a decade ago, and the associated doom-mongering predilections did not come to pass, I think it's fair to conclude it's a dud.
Really? You think that things built decades ago can't be further built-upon in the now or the future?
>Slippery slope, but an interesting argument. While SteamOS is a thing, Steam isn't my OS.
You mean non slippery slope?
>Really? You think that things built decades ago can't be further built-upon in the now or the future?
If there's no deadlines for predilections, how can we score them? Should we still be worried about some yet undiscovered way that cell phones are causing cancer, despite decades of apparently no harmful side effects?
This is the doommongering coming to pass. Did it happen overnight? No! But you just provided the excuse! "gee see nothing bad came to pass. We can just use that tool"
I bet you are the same clown that also says that we don't need QA because there are no incidents in production