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Comment by motohagiography

3 months ago

Even steelmaning the case for age verification, does anyone really think the state is going to re-institute the innocence of childhood by filtering content and services? Of course not. There is no steelman. If you can do age, you can do identity, and the purpose of identity is recourse for authorities against truth and humor.

Doing ID or this fake age verification with anything other than a physical secure element is a dumb regulation that going to create its own regulatory arbitrages and spawn very powerful and profitable black and grey markets. Poor laws create criminal economic opportunity, and digital id is just creating a massive one.

Between Meta being behind a digital id initiative under the pretext of alleged "age verification" and the Debian project leads pivoting to political objectives, it appears gen Z now has a cause to build tech against and fight for. These are dying organizations that cannot innovate and they've attracted a pestilence that is pivoting them to the easier problem of political maneuvering. as it's easier to militate for what nobody wants than to make something anyone actually wants.

The upside is that people get to be hackers again. Tools to cleanse our networks and systems of Meta and other surveillance companies and the influence of these compromised organizations are an OS install and a vibecoding weekend away.

6 comments

motohagiography

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ziml77  3 months ago

What do you mean if you can do age you can do identity? If age is self-reported that's not true. Or if you need strong validation, ZKPs are possible where it is also not true.

  • motohagiography  3 months ago

    design the protocol. we can run down the rabbit holes of anonymous attestation and yao's millionaire problem, but there's a simpler problem: the age of whom? Once you have a unique identifier, or even an anonymous one derived from a verified one, you are still creating an user identity scheme that is being imposed on people.

    what is most likely in play, as we have seen in other identity schemes, is that the cryptography will be sufficiently opaque that experts won't be able to reason about it until after the products are forced on people, or, they will just accept junk protocols and use the law to shift liability to the user to comply with identifying themselves truthfully on the internet. the other scenario is if the protocol provides strong anonymity, it will use a bunch of new primitives without mature standards that happen to have escrow access built in.

pjc50  3 months ago

> Debian project leads pivoting to political objectives

What does this mean? Free software was always a politics of itself.