Comment by vohk

Private torrent trackers have been doing this for a while. If some number of your downstreams act like shitheads - you get nipped and so do your other downstreams.

PGP’s web of trust was kinda bad privacy-wise in some regards, as it basically revealed your IRL social network.

If my PGP public key has 6 signatures and they’re all members of the East Manitoba Arch Linux User Group, you can probably work out pretty easily which Michael T I am.

Are there successful newer designs, which avoid this problem?

> Note that "attestation through a web of trust" means something like needing an invite from an existing user.

It's probably better to call this something like vouching and leave "attestation" as the contemptible power grab by megacorps delenda est. The advantage in using the same word for a useful thing as a completely unrelated vile thing only goes to the villain.

Then how can you have a community that is welcoming to people who are not part of the ingroup?

I want to create a community for immigrants. How would I make it welcoming to recent immigrants for whom no one can vouch?

A web of trust is a wonderful tool, but it's exclusive by design. This is a problem for some communities, even though it makes others much better.

Which is, funnily (?) enough, how a lot of IRL organizations used to be. And basically don't be of the wrong ethnicity or religion.

It still happens more informally today, of course, but it used to be a pretty (if un-spoken) part of how a lot of WASPy organizations operated to a greater or lesser degree.

Tell your TPM who you are and prove it with face and fingerprint ID that get matched to a real old person.

Leave them on the device, authorize the device to validate before age inappropriate content appears.

Website wants to know your age? Your face and fingerprint support your attestation signed by a trusted party.

Can it be tricked potentially? Sure, but then you’re probably a super genius kid and not the reason that these laws were created (as if).

Don’t let anyone tell you anonymity must die for safety to exist.

EU's ZKP implementation provides complete anonymity and untrackability:

https://eudi.dev/2.8.0/discussion-topics/g-zero-knowledge-pr...

> It's another factor in why I think the tech community needs to get ahead of governments on the whole "prove your ID on the Internet" thing by having some sort of standard way to do it that doesn't necessarily involve madness in the loop.

The problem here is that the premise is the error. "Prove your ID" is the thing to be prevented. It's the privacy invasion. What people actually want are a disjoint set of only marginally related things:

1) They want a way to rate limit something. IDs do this poorly anyway; everyone has one so anyone so criminal organizations with a botnet just compromise the IDs of innocent people -- and then the innocent are the ones who get banned. The best way to do this one would be to have an anonymous way for ordinary people to pay a nominal fee. A $5 one-time fee to create an account is nothing to most ordinary people but a major expense to spammers who have 10,000 of their accounts banned every day. The ugly hack for not having this is proof of work, which kinda sorta works but not as well, and then you're back to botnets being useful because $50,000/day in losses is cash money to the attacker that in turn funds the service's anti-spam team, but burning up some compromised victim's electricity is at best the opportunity cost of not mining cryptocurrency or similar, which isn't nearly as much. It would be great to solve this one (properly anonymous easy to use small payments) but the state of the law is a significant impediment so you either need to get some reform through there or come up with a creative way to do it under the existing rules.

2) You want to know if someone is e.g. over 18. This is the one where people keep pointing back to government IDs, but you only need one piece of information for this. You don't need their name, their picture, you don't even need their exact birthdate. Since people get older over time rather than younger, all you need to know is whether they've ever been over 18, since in that case they always will be. Which means you can just issue an "over 18" digital signature -- the same signature, so it's provably impossible to tie it to a specific person -- and give a copy to anyone who is over 18. Maybe you change the signature e.g. once a day and unconditionally (whether they require it that day or not) email all the adults a new copy, but again they all get the same indistinguishable current signature. Then there are no timing attacks because the new signature comes to everyone as an unconditional push and is waiting for them in their inbox rather than something where the request coincides with the time you want to use it for something, but kids only have it if an adult is giving it to them every day. The latter is true for basically any age verification system -- if an adult with an ID wants to lend it to you then you can get in.

3) You want to know if the person accessing some account is the same person who created it or is otherwise authorized to use it. This is the traditional use of IDs, e.g. you go to the bank and want to withdraw some cash so you need a bank card or government ID to prove you're the account holder. But this is the problem which is already long-solved on the internet. The user has a username and password, TOTP, etc. and then the service can tell if they're authorized to use the account. It's why you don't need government ID on the internet -- user accounts do the thing it used to do only they don't force you to tie all your accounts together against a single name, which is a feature. The only people who want to prevent this are the surveillance apparatchiks who are trying to take that feature away.

I'd be interested in working on a problem like that.

I have a strong preference for remaining anonymous or at least making it a reasonably high bar to tying my online identity to my personal identity

I would love to be involved in helping to design a sort of "human verified" badge that doesn't necessarily make it possible or at least not easy for everyone to find your real identity

I've been thinking about it a bunch and it seems like a really interesting problem. Difficult though.

I suspect there is too much political and corporate will that wants to force everyone online to use their real identity in the open, though

In order to make this viable, wouldn't you have to verify identity repeatedly? What's to stop me from providing a valid identity and then handing my account over to an agent after I'm verified?

I guess it would have to be something like a service which confirms whether a person already has an account on the site but doesn’t have to track which particular account it is.

I’m not sure if that would work for account deletions though.

That is effectively impossible though. There's data centers of stripped down phones, so "it's actually a phone" doesn't do it.

What's stoping bots to verify identity? This will not work, especially with frequent data breaches.

this eye thing will never work. people in general are realizing the last people we should trust with our personal stuff are tech bro billionaires. they’ve broken trust too many times.

even worse many of them are just plain vocal about their disdain for people in general.

at least from what i’m seeing, people are starting to walk away from online at an increasing rate so i definitely don’t see widespread adoption of his creepy eye thing.

I’m imagining like, a physical place you would go and get your text spoken out of your personal speaker directly into someone else’s microphones.

LLMs can curse without issue

Who doesn't love capybaras?

Digital totalitarianism would prevent it. The moment you were found to be running a bot, your identity would be blacklisted across the entire internet.

To the contrary, platforms like Facebook and X demonstrate that even personal verification won't save you from identity politics.