Comment by jonathanstrange
13 hours ago
First of all, the sane chip card design will not take place. That's virtually guaranteed. As a closely related example, banks all over the world have moved away from this design to merely trust the (nonexistent) security of mobile phones. Why? Costs and convenience.
Second, if you hand over a chip card, you still need to lock down and tightly control every executable on every machine. How else would you guarantee that kids cannot access content the government deems unsuitable for them?
Third, I still haven't seen a coherent argument why parents shouldn't be in charge of what content their children are allowed to consume. I'm not at all against governments providing free parental control software, for example, or voluntary industry standards similar to the movie ratings.
Finally, "protecting the children" is obviously a pretense. The sole purpose of the push for this is for governments to get the foot in the door of operating systems they currently can't control well. It's the starting point for a surveillance infrastructure: age verification -> digital ID verification -> tracking who said what and handing the data over to intelligence and law enforcement.
> First of all, the sane chip card design will not take place. That's virtually guaranteed. As a closely related example, banks all over the world have moved away from this design to merely trust the (nonexistent) security of mobile phones. Why? Costs and convenience.
Businesses are always going to favor the cheapest options, but that's why regulation exist.
> Second, if you hand over a chip card, you still need to lock down and tightly control every executable on every machine. How else would you guarantee that kids cannot access content the government deems unsuitable for them?
You don't need to guarantee that. It's like saying you can't have an alcohol consumption ban on teenagers without spying on them all the time. It's technically true but it doesn't matter: having teenagers consume way less booze due to the rules than they would without it, and that's fine for most people, societies don't need to enforce an absolute 100% ban of things for bans to deliver the expected outcome.
> Third, I still haven't seen a coherent argument why parents shouldn't be in charge of what content their children are allowed to consume.
It's much less about what their children are allowed to consume, but what are businesses allowed to sell to their children. It's exactly like alcohol restrictions: the government don't raid houses to check if parents are letting child drink whine and beer at home, but it aggressively enforces that bars don't sell booze to teenagers.
> Finally, "protecting the children" is obviously a pretense.
Not from the electors. Most people are favorable to these things, and that's why these laws are voted. Obviously intelligence agencies are always trying to get access to more data whenever they can, but that's not the reason why these laws are voted, and the representatives routinely could vote for a version of that which doesn't serve any intelligence purpose.
The world you describe is not plausible from a technical perspective. Any kid who wants to will be able to download a tool that will enable them to surf the net like an adult. It will be as common as our access to cracked C64 games during the 1980s. The only thing to limit this in any reasonable sense is to crack down hard on all operating systems and network software.
At the very least, you will need to make sure that no child can install Linux. Otherwise, why wouldn't they? Most kids aren't stupid and want to know what their braindead parents are doing on the internet.
I really believe it's dangerously naive to believe this is about the children. It's quite obvious why suddenly ominous entities are shilling for age verification, digital IDs, digital wallets, and so on (more is to come). Countries in the EU used to get valuable SIGINT from the US that prevented many serious crimes. They still get it but now they've realized that the US might not always remain aligned with them and panic because they have almost no access to modern operating systems except for buying 0-day exploits on shady black markets. They desperately need to get their foot in the door to get the right surveillance infrastructure going. At the same time, politicians are rightly worried about the influence of bots on elections.
These are the principal reason why governments are suddenly pushing for this. If this was about the children, they'd have done it 30 years earlier. Until very recently, this discussion didn't even exist. It's manufactured.
> Any kid who wants to will be able to download a tool that will enable them to surf the net like an adult. It will be as common as our access to cracked C64 games during the 1980s. The only thing to limit this in any reasonable sense is to crack down hard on all operating systems and network software.
Not if they use a credit-card-like ID that embed a side-channel-resistant cryptographic chip like your credit card does. Your average teenager can't crack a credit card no matter how hard they try.
> I really believe it's dangerously naive to believe this is about the children. It's quite obvious why suddenly ominous entities are shilling for age verification, digital IDs, digital wallets, and so on (more is to come). Countries in the EU used to get valuable SIGINT from the US that prevented many serious crimes. They still get it but now they've realized that the US might not always remain aligned with them and panic because they have almost no access to modern operating systems except for buying 0-day exploits on shady black markets. They desperately need to get their foot in the door to get the right surveillance infrastructure going. At the same time, politicians are rightly worried about the influence of bots on elections.
I'm very disappointed to read this kind of tinfoil hat conspiracy theory here on HN.