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Discussion (29 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
The real reason, of course, is to force people to connect strong real-life identifiers to online activity. Mobile first, then Windows. Then Linux is too weak to oppose on its own, and will adapt or die.
We restrict certain activities and places in the real world from certain people all the time. For example, not allowing people under 18 or 21 (depending on your country) into casinos. What we have now is essentially unrestricted access to pretty much anything and a fair assessment is that there is societal harm from that. We're creating gambling addicts (which is arguably the most harmful form of addiction), allowing predators to interact with children,, manipulating children through advertising and algorithms, flaming harmful behaviors like eating disorders, allowing mass cyberbullying and so on.
So saying "we should allow unfettered access to the internet" or even "it's the parents' responsibility" is naive, dismissive and has failed. The only question from here is what to d we do about it. You can say "nothing" but that's a losing argument.
I personally believe that the easiest thign to attack is advertising to minors. This will take away the financial incentive for these platforms to create addictive behaivors in minors. And most of these tech platforms have already built the infrastructure to do this. You don't allow advertisers to target an audience based on (actual or inferred) ages under 18. You extend that to proxies for age, like an interest in Minecraft. And you make advertising to children illegal.
Arguably, I'd go further and restrict certain features for minors, such as comments on Youtube and an algorithmic feed.
At the moment nobody is solving anything because it's simply a fight to move liability to someone else. Meta wants hardware vendors to be responsible because, guess what?, they have no hardware platform. Apple and Google likely want app to have to deal with it for the complete opposite reason.
I believe we should shift that liability to advertising.
These are not equivalent. Restricting access to a casino just requires showing an ID to a person. A few seconds later and that person has completely forgotten everything about you. They will not keep a record of your home address, etc. Perfectly privacy preserving. You have no such guarantee when you upload government IDs to a server.
I don't think anyone here minds restricting access, but that doesn't require completely destroying ownership rights over our own devices nor internet and device privacy.
All that really needs to be done is for servers to publish what type of content they show from a parental perspective in a machine-readable format and for devices to have parental controls that only allow access to servers that publish such info and which content is allowed by the parental settings.
This should be even more effective than solutions requiring uploading IDs since there's still going to be servers out there in other jurisdictions that simply don't care for such things.
We can all agree that yeah sure this stuff isn't great, but that's the whole point of freedom. Fast food isn't great either but lawmakers aren't pushing for a junk food attestation framework to make sure you don't consume it more than twice a week. In other words, your best interest is not interesting to them at all. They are happy that you think it is somehow self evident that you subject yourself to undue surveillance through!
So, wonder why they're pushing for this so hard. I'll take the brainrot if it means criticism and ideas can spread without permanently being associated with a trackable, unchanging identity.
It's as if the government first let businesses install slot machines at every street corner, then suddenly went "I'm shocked, shocked! that we have a massive epidemic of gambling addiction here, we have to mandate anti-gambling shock collars for everyone to tackle this urgent problem! There is no alternative!"
"Arguably" heroin addiction is the most harmful addiction because heroin is the most addictive substance, clouds judgement and drives the addict to all manners of sociopathic behaviour (not only theft or prostitition)
This isn't only a digital sovereignty issue, it's also an anti-competition issue.
Our AI gods cannot save us soon enough.
AI is about many things, but a big factor is enclosure.
The EU politicians are just publicly paying lip-service to "digital sovereignty" while they quietly hope this all just blows over when Trump is gone in 2 years.
But if they really wanted digital verification without the surveillance capitalism built in, I’m sure there are plenty of companies that could do it. Especially if it was around an open source framework.
It's hard for sure but they are not even trying, the non-duopoly alternatives are run by hobbyists in their free time and just get shit on by EU bureaucrats
That's a weird way of putting it. You'll basically need a second non-Linux device if you want to use Linux.
If your reason for using Linux is "I want to continue using old hardware instead of quickly-obsoleted devices", then you're shit outta luck: you'll have to buy a (potentially second) device from one of those vendors who'll use the profits to further lobby against your rights.
(and of course even if they were to support computers, an age/id verification system either won't work at all or only work to be abused by those in power)
We did it before. We forgot at the time when things were more-or-less free.
(I don't know how we do this. I'm as dependent as ever.)
usually to make use of the exposure multi-party collusion is required. Google or Apple attestation intermediaries (they convert your static certificate into an ephemeral one) would need to be logging information and when combined with information from the party you attested to (done with the ephemeral certificate) they will have your unique device identifier (the unchangeable certificate burned into the silicon).
it's doubly insidious because nothing is preventing the manufacturer from recording the certificate identifier and connecting it to an order ID for the device. so not only can they tie together multiple accounts, they could tie it to the identity that purchased the device.
on mobile devices you can't even restrict this functionality as it's exposed via API (remote attestation and also DRM license request handshake initiation). not even grapheneos gives you to option to disable it.
also, the implication of the above is that there is no private way to have a google account on an android phone. they will know it's you or the previous owner of the device who sold it to you (makes VPN irrelevant).
Hardware-bound is not a problem, limiting that to only iPhones and some Android phones is. Plenty of hardware can keep a key safe and it doesn't need Apple's or Google's blessing.
Considering a significant part of the internet will be behind age verification gates, how are they imagining this to work? I should pull out my iPhone or Google Android phone and get its approval every time I want to visit a website?
European "age verification" "app" forcing everyone to use Android or iOS
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48903777
Stop Killing the Internet: No Digital ID and No Age Verification
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49084938
...but then again, this is the EU, not the US.
What's frustrating is that it works really well, and occasionally they get something truly stupid through- which goes a long way to whipping up anti-EU sentiment, but then they're forcing their countries to actually do the stupid thing... Nobody seems to call out this self-sabotage.
The head of the EU, Ursula von der Leyen, isn't known to be anti-EU.
I used to track the voting history of UKIP members, the site "VoteWatch Europe" used to make this easy, but it shut down in 2022.
UKIP were constantly voting for things to be discussed (when they bothered to vote at all), and then when they were discussed they would thump chest in the media about how the EU was talking about doing the thing they had voted to discuss (with the verbiage to suggest the EU would definitely do it, against the will of the British- forgetting entirely that we had a veto anyway...).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46784572
How much do you love your systemd and the individual behind it now?
Can't wait to use your "amutable" Linux with hardware-bound attestation verifying your age now can you?
These people (the politicians behind such decisions, the people working on such platforms, those saying it's a good thing, ...) are enemies of freedom.