3 ms·

Can you explain why you think the online world should be so different to the physical world, which is full of places where I need to use an ID to get age-limite

Can you explain why you think the online world should be so different to the physical world, which is full of places where I need to use an ID to get age-limited items? I really don't feel monsters were made by stopping children buying porn and alcohol. Do you think those age restrictions should be removed too? Particularly as more of society moves from physical to virtual.

jrflowers 1y ago
> Can you explain why you think the online world should be so different to the physical world When you show a bartender your ID to buy a beer they generally don’t photocopy it and store it along with your picture next to an itemized list of every beer you’ve ever drank
fellowniusmonk 1y ago
If bouncers copied my id, my home address and a bunch of private data every time I went to a bar I'd never go out. This whole premise is absurd. There is tons of research and empirical and historical evidence that living in a surveillance state stifled free expression and thus narrows the richness of human creation and experimentation. How old are you that you think constant surveillance is any kind of way to live? It's a thin gruel of a life.
- teddyh 1y ago
  > It's a thin gruel of a life. But it’s the only one they will ever know.
- CJefferson 1y ago
  I'm happy to discuss different methods of age verification, I agree I don't want websites copying my ID. However, I'm not against the concept of age verification, and believe it can be done well. How old are you, to make that last comment just because you need your ID to buy a beer?
  - rpdillon 1y ago
    > just because you need your ID to buy a beer You keep making this comparison, but it's not appropriate. The closest real-world analogy: in order to buy alcohol, you need to wear a tracking bracelet at all times, and be identified at every store you enter, even you you choose to purchase nothing. If our automated systems can't identify you with certainty, you'll be limited to only being able to do things a child could do. And the real world has a huge gap between a child and an adult. If an 8-year old walked into Home Depot and bought a circular saw, there's no law against it, but the store might have questions. If a 14-year old did it, you might get a different result. At 17, they'd almost certainly let you. The real world has people that are observing things and using judgement. Submitting to automated age checks online is not that.
    - CJefferson 1y ago
      It's appropriate (to me) as a limit society has decided it wants, and we should consider if there is a reason similar limits should, or should not, apply to the internet. The whole article we are discussing is how that could be implemented in a much more privacy-sade way.
      - rpdillon 1y ago
        But my point is that it won't be. The laws are getting passed, and there is no privacy preservation, there are no ZKPs, there's nothing except "submit your ID". You keep holding out for good faith, but the folks making the rules aren't acting in good faith. I very much appreciate the discussion here, but I think we're coming into the discussion with a different set of priors, so even if our values match, we might not agree.
        rpdillon 1y ago
        Just to emphasize the point, the EU's age verification laws are actively preventing Android users from utilizing third party app stores because the implementation is tied to Google Play integrity services. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44801851 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44801851 Just extremely clear that the implementation is an afterthought.
- lif 1y ago
  This seems like such a lost cause to carry on about. The fact that the post originates from a what appears to be an furry-aligned individual is probably not going to help get a majority of people to be sympathetic. There appears to be no formidable organized resistance against the recent decades of surveillance boom. With tech and many tech employees actively accelerating surveillance. Horrible? yes. And extremely unlikely to be rolled back anytime soon. (Disagree? I'd love to believe you are right!)
  - fellowniusmonk 1y ago
    Lost causes are worth fighting for and keeping in the public eye, in the history of ideas being written off or challenges being considered impossible to overcome many end up swinging back hard the other way as long as they are ripe (the framework is preserved and still championed) and there is an inciting incident that swings public sentiment. Defeatist attitudes and throwing in the towel almost never makes sense, engaging at a lower degree of time commitment is sensible for some, the meta commentary about it being hopeless is one of the worst types of self defeating comments a person can make, especially if they aren't in opposition, whose time are you trying to optimize with the comment? To what point and purpose are you saying this except to further deflate sails on an already still day? The zeitgeist isn't purely rational or stable, change is often non linear, I've seen small subcultures with "impossible" headwinds completely own the space within my lifetime, we're just at the heel turn now and it's not universally popular, many people don't speak up because they are just getting vpns or moving to other forms of non-violent non-compliance.
    - some_furry 1y ago
      I suspect a lot of doomposting online is someone writing down their negative self talk hoping some stranger will finally provide a convincing argument that they can use to fight their own feelings on the matter. It's like... involuntary group therapy? Anyway, it's a waste of time. ... Or is it?
techjamie 1y ago
The issue is, it's not feasible to enforce these sorts of bans because the internet is too vast. Yes, you can stop people from visiting PH or any of the big sites, but for every big porn sites, there will be thousands of fly by night ones looking to make a buck. Age verification laws create a market for such sites which can be ran out of jurisdictions that the law can't control. So next, we better make the devices age gate their users with attestation and destroy people's ability to use open operating systems on the web. Maybe for good measure we tell ISPs to block any traffic to foreign sites unless the OS reports that attestation. But people are using VPNs to bounce traffic to other countries anyway, so now we need to ban those. But people still send each other porn over encrypted channels so we need to make sure encrypted platforms implement our backdoor so we can read it all, on top of on-device scanning which further edges out any open source players left in the game. At what point do we stop chasing the rabbit?
rpdillon 1y ago
> online world should be so different to the physical world If you take a step back, they are _very_ different, in myriad ways. But to answer your question very concretely: because we're turning the web into a "Paper's Please" scenario and the analogy with "I'm 12 but I can't walk into this smoke shop" doesn't hold. I shared a story on HN that didn't take off about how Google is now scanning _all_ YouTube accounts with AI, and if their AI thinks you're underage, your only recourse after the "kid limit" your account is to submit a government-issued ID to get your account back. This has nothing to do with buying cigarettes and alcohol. This is about identifying everyone online (which advertisers would be thrilled about), and censoring speech. In short, the mechanisms being used online are significantly more intrusive than anything in the real world. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44740409 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44740409
- CJefferson 1y ago
  I'm happy to discuss they are very different, and I agree the current systems (in the UK in particular), are awful. However, I think tech people risk losing this battle by saying (it seems to me, and in the post I originally replied to) "any attempt at any age checking on the internet is basically 1984", rather than "we need some way of checking some things, keeping people's privacy safe, this current system is awful." Of course, if some people believe the internet should be 100% uncensored, no restrictions, they can have that viewpoint. But honestly, I don't agree.
  - rpdillon 1y ago
    I'm a huge proponent of legislation that requires sites so send a header that indicates they are serving adult content in that request. I'm also a huge proponent of basic endpoint security that allows a parent to put the device into a mode that checks for those headers and blocks the response. This doesn't require any of the draconian 1984 measures that folks are insisting upon. The problem is there is no real incentive to implement true age-verification in this manner (this is why nobody has deployed ZKP), but rather to identify everyone. So while it would be ultra easy to imagine an onboarding scenario during device setup that asks: 1. Will this device be assigned to a child? 2. Supply the age so we can track when they cross over 18 3. Automatically reject responses with the adult header and lock down this setting But Google and Apple won't do that, because they don't care, and the politicians won't bake it into their laws, because they don't are either: their goal is to alter culture, and protecting children is just an excuse.

jrflowers 1y ago

> Can you explain why you think the online world should be so different to the physical world When you show a bartender your ID to buy a beer they generally don’t photocopy it and store it along with your picture next to an itemized list of every beer you’ve ever drank

fellowniusmonk 1y ago

If bouncers copied my id, my home address and a bunch of private data every time I went to a bar I'd never go out. This whole premise is absurd. There is tons of research and empirical and historical evidence that living in a surveillance state stifled free expression and thus narrows the richness of human creation and experimentation. How old are you that you think constant surveillance is any kind of way to live? It's a thin gruel of a life.

teddyh 1y ago
> It's a thin gruel of a life. But it’s the only one they will ever know.
CJefferson 1y ago
I'm happy to discuss different methods of age verification, I agree I don't want websites copying my ID. However, I'm not against the concept of age verification, and believe it can be done well. How old are you, to make that last comment just because you need your ID to buy a beer?
- rpdillon 1y ago
  > just because you need your ID to buy a beer You keep making this comparison, but it's not appropriate. The closest real-world analogy: in order to buy alcohol, you need to wear a tracking bracelet at all times, and be identified at every store you enter, even you you choose to purchase nothing. If our automated systems can't identify you with certainty, you'll be limited to only being able to do things a child could do. And the real world has a huge gap between a child and an adult. If an 8-year old walked into Home Depot and bought a circular saw, there's no law against it, but the store might have questions. If a 14-year old did it, you might get a different result. At 17, they'd almost certainly let you. The real world has people that are observing things and using judgement. Submitting to automated age checks online is not that.
  - CJefferson 1y ago
    It's appropriate (to me) as a limit society has decided it wants, and we should consider if there is a reason similar limits should, or should not, apply to the internet. The whole article we are discussing is how that could be implemented in a much more privacy-sade way.
    - rpdillon 1y ago
      But my point is that it won't be. The laws are getting passed, and there is no privacy preservation, there are no ZKPs, there's nothing except "submit your ID". You keep holding out for good faith, but the folks making the rules aren't acting in good faith. I very much appreciate the discussion here, but I think we're coming into the discussion with a different set of priors, so even if our values match, we might not agree.
      - rpdillon 1y ago
        Just to emphasize the point, the EU's age verification laws are actively preventing Android users from utilizing third party app stores because the implementation is tied to Google Play integrity services. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44801851 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44801851 Just extremely clear that the implementation is an afterthought.
lif 1y ago
This seems like such a lost cause to carry on about. The fact that the post originates from a what appears to be an furry-aligned individual is probably not going to help get a majority of people to be sympathetic. There appears to be no formidable organized resistance against the recent decades of surveillance boom. With tech and many tech employees actively accelerating surveillance. Horrible? yes. And extremely unlikely to be rolled back anytime soon. (Disagree? I'd love to believe you are right!)
- fellowniusmonk 1y ago
  Lost causes are worth fighting for and keeping in the public eye, in the history of ideas being written off or challenges being considered impossible to overcome many end up swinging back hard the other way as long as they are ripe (the framework is preserved and still championed) and there is an inciting incident that swings public sentiment. Defeatist attitudes and throwing in the towel almost never makes sense, engaging at a lower degree of time commitment is sensible for some, the meta commentary about it being hopeless is one of the worst types of self defeating comments a person can make, especially if they aren't in opposition, whose time are you trying to optimize with the comment? To what point and purpose are you saying this except to further deflate sails on an already still day? The zeitgeist isn't purely rational or stable, change is often non linear, I've seen small subcultures with "impossible" headwinds completely own the space within my lifetime, we're just at the heel turn now and it's not universally popular, many people don't speak up because they are just getting vpns or moving to other forms of non-violent non-compliance.
  - some_furry 1y ago
    I suspect a lot of doomposting online is someone writing down their negative self talk hoping some stranger will finally provide a convincing argument that they can use to fight their own feelings on the matter. It's like... involuntary group therapy? Anyway, it's a waste of time. ... Or is it?

techjamie 1y ago

The issue is, it's not feasible to enforce these sorts of bans because the internet is too vast. Yes, you can stop people from visiting PH or any of the big sites, but for every big porn sites, there will be thousands of fly by night ones looking to make a buck. Age verification laws create a market for such sites which can be ran out of jurisdictions that the law can't control. So next, we better make the devices age gate their users with attestation and destroy people's ability to use open operating systems on the web. Maybe for good measure we tell ISPs to block any traffic to foreign sites unless the OS reports that attestation. But people are using VPNs to bounce traffic to other countries anyway, so now we need to ban those. But people still send each other porn over encrypted channels so we need to make sure encrypted platforms implement our backdoor so we can read it all, on top of on-device scanning which further edges out any open source players left in the game. At what point do we stop chasing the rabbit?

rpdillon 1y ago

> online world should be so different to the physical world If you take a step back, they are _very_ different, in myriad ways. But to answer your question very concretely: because we're turning the web into a "Paper's Please" scenario and the analogy with "I'm 12 but I can't walk into this smoke shop" doesn't hold. I shared a story on HN that didn't take off about how Google is now scanning _all_ YouTube accounts with AI, and if their AI thinks you're underage, your only recourse after the "kid limit" your account is to submit a government-issued ID to get your account back. This has nothing to do with buying cigarettes and alcohol. This is about identifying everyone online (which advertisers would be thrilled about), and censoring speech. In short, the mechanisms being used online are significantly more intrusive than anything in the real world. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44740409 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44740409

CJefferson 1y ago
I'm happy to discuss they are very different, and I agree the current systems (in the UK in particular), are awful. However, I think tech people risk losing this battle by saying (it seems to me, and in the post I originally replied to) "any attempt at any age checking on the internet is basically 1984", rather than "we need some way of checking some things, keeping people's privacy safe, this current system is awful." Of course, if some people believe the internet should be 100% uncensored, no restrictions, they can have that viewpoint. But honestly, I don't agree.
- rpdillon 1y ago
  I'm a huge proponent of legislation that requires sites so send a header that indicates they are serving adult content in that request. I'm also a huge proponent of basic endpoint security that allows a parent to put the device into a mode that checks for those headers and blocks the response. This doesn't require any of the draconian 1984 measures that folks are insisting upon. The problem is there is no real incentive to implement true age-verification in this manner (this is why nobody has deployed ZKP), but rather to identify everyone. So while it would be ultra easy to imagine an onboarding scenario during device setup that asks: 1. Will this device be assigned to a child? 2. Supply the age so we can track when they cross over 18 3. Automatically reject responses with the adult header and lock down this setting But Google and Apple won't do that, because they don't care, and the politicians won't bake it into their laws, because they don't are either: their goal is to alter culture, and protecting children is just an excuse.