Comment by atmosx
7 hours ago
There is a surprising amount of engineers who don’t understand what’s happening. So they deal with it as if it’s a funny thing… yeah if two police officers come knocking your door with hard data, you will just explain… and yeah, I mean kids, can bypass it… right? Wrong. This is not 1995. They can make very harsh laws and they can make it borderline impossible to bypass should some authority choose to do so.
The danger here is control: total and absolute control of who will be able to see what, at any given time. Once upon a time this was a hard problem, not anymore.
The last time I had police knocking at my door, it was a lot more than two, and they were readying their battering ram when I opened, and then immediately swarmed me and told me to sit down, and then I just explained and they realized their warrant was for a different address and they left. It was scary in the moment, but I never had a gun pointed at me and I wasn't even touched, so overall it left me with a rather positive impression of how search warrants are executed in Germany.
By all means, if you have an adversarial relationship with the state, fight every expansion of its power tooth and nail. But conversely, if you think that everything is going basically fine and the police are reasonable folks overall, then giving them more power doesn't look like a slippery slope straight to dystopia.
> giving them more power doesn't look like a slippery slope straight to dystopia.
This only makes sense if you have no concept of "future", wherein different, less reasonable people can gain power. This should be especially obvious in Germany, where an adversarial relationship with the state can easily be had by merely criticizing it.
The solution then seems to be holding people in power accountable, no?
Digital ID or not, the situation won't improve until we get actual representation that works for the people.
> giving them more power doesn't look like a slippery slope straight to dystopia.
Are you seriously saying that with a straight face while (apparently) living in Germany of all places?
May I suggest picking up a history book or two?
Serious question - looking around, do you really think "everything is going basically fine"?
Would you think the same thing if you happened not to be there, came home half an hour later to find your apartment ransacked with the door smashed in, and had to wait a few months for compensation for the repairs?
Unfortunately, reasonable men, perhaps virtually all reasonable men, can and will become more corrupted by expansive power. The fact that they were not corrupted when they had less leverage on the populace doesn't mean they will behave differently than other historical German (/human) apparats when they have a bit more of the intoxicating liquor.
>r warrant was for a different address and they left.
I am sorry but this is not something that I find "reasonable" or "positive impression" unless small children are the instigators or low stakes events are involved. If armed men are barging into sacred spaces they need to be able to triple, quadruple check they are performing what the warrant says and if not then nothing else they are doing shall be trusted either. Invading a home uninvited is a life and death matter and there is no room for policeman who make such glaring mistakes even if the natural untrained or undisciplined random person naturally might.
what's the current solution that's impossible for kids to bypass with a borrowed or stolen id, say?
I don't see any proposals yet that will actually work for what they say they'll do.
You want a proposal? Make a kids-only set of sites. And then make hardware/software that can access only those sites. Make sure existing and future "non-kid" hardware can't access those kids-only sites. You can allow companies to register that they are one of these kid friendly sites with the additional regulation that would entail. Then make a kid having hardware that can access the normal Internet like having a beer in the US. Now perhaps you can find a hole in this, but it can be patched with technology and the right regulation.
That we aren't doing something like this gives the game away. How the EU is going about this means the point of all of this has nothing to do with children and everything to do with controlling political speech.
PS Yea, I know its a very vague suggestion, it can still be implemented
One issue that I see with this type of system is that it doesn't allow for parental/guardian oversight of what kids are doing or discussing.
Ever gone down the auto-suggestion rabbit hole on YouTube Kids? You start getting into weird and potentially disturbing territory much more quickly than you'd expect.
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What's to stop an adult from using the "kids only" hardware?
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Lots have been made. It's not a hard technical problem.
You have to stop thinking like an engineer and start thinking like a public health official.
'Something impossible for kids to bypass' is not the goal. It's akin to evaluating a flu vaccine on the standard of zero breakthrough cases. Such a standard has no relevance on the efficacy of the vaccine.
Likewise for underage internet access. Proponents would be happily satisfied with 90% compliance. They really don't care that coverage isn't complete or circumvention is complete. Once you realize that, you can start constructing counterarguments that dismantle the claim that digital IDs would solve the problems they're supposed to.
Here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49080929
There is discussion about LLMs, models, CSAM, undressing people with AI, and posting those images to places.
No handy wavy stuff, makes this problem go away due to filtering at creation. That's because, open models are a thing. So you either ban all open models, or maybe make it a crime to publish uncensored models, or you punish what individuals do on the internet.
Slander and libel and defamation are a thing, and have been a thing forever, millennia. Suddenly, on the open and free internet, for barely an eyeblink, anyone could say anything with zero liability and responsibility.
Then, 2010s came. Then, doxing of people we didn't like, or didn't agree with, became OK. So suddenly, it was OK to "out" a person, but not to just force everyone to be de-anonymoized. In other words, unpopular opinions? Yeah, that's OK to remove the cloak.
And with AI, everyone and their dog will be able to render images of anyone they want naked. CSAM. Political lies, made up videos, slander, libel, literal wors in people's mouths, on and on.
What's my point?
Well, just as 2000 brought a new world to people, 2025 is doing the same.
This is only going to get worse. And I fully agree, the dangers for "control" are going to exist. But the dangers of people posting all of this stuff, has hit the point where a lot of people are uncomfortable with it. And if you think Grok creating CSAM is bad, then you must think anyone creating CSAM is bad. Or anything. So how to you prevent the harm?
Well really, you either heavily restrict software. Open LLMs, or?
You make people posting this stuff liable.
The world is at a fork. Everything will change. Because banning software requires immense control over hosting software, but so does deanonymizing the internet. And really, this is inline with how the political and societal landscape changes.
It's only been 20 years since a lot of people were on the Internet, and only 10 years since I'd label it 'mainstream'. As in, even grandma uses it. And so, now the laws are coming, as legislation and law and change takes time for politicians, and political bodies.
We're here. Right now. This is the moment.
So I 100% guarantee that absolutely nothing will stop the path to liability for slander, libel, and more that is coming. Nothing. Whatever it takes, you can be sure it will happen.
So how will it happen?
Well, by knowing who to sue.
Like it or not, that's the truth. And no, I don't like it myself.
They're just protecting the kids, at least to start with.
From what?
I truly believe unfettered access to endless scroll dopamine is bad for adults, but even more terrible for a developing mind. It reduces attention span, increases anxiety, etc. Pushing the onus on parents for healthy internet consumption is probably not effective because most families have both parents working jobs and can't be on top of their kids 24/7.
Now... how to effectively address this problem without introducing a dystopian surveillance state? I don't have a good answer.
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