The EU’s age verification project confirms hardware-bound attestation is mandatory, raising concerns over Linux, custom ROMs, and open-source access.
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I think there is a flaw in EU’s way of acting and functioning. European countries seem to be sharing the same cultural values yet there are different deeper values hidden to the foreigner from country to country. For example we look at Middle East, Africa, Asia and we easily spot cultural differences. Yet we fail to see the gaps between our countries inside EU. Holland and northern countries had for years a culture of child protection on computing devices,and not only,that 20 years ago I found strange. There is an industry for that in there and thriving. What they just did was to apply their normality to us, without them understanding the gap. They just don’t understand the issue. Controlling children like that is normal for them.
Fuck EU.
Well, in that case, fuck you too.
The EU is the only organization that fairly consistently tries to do the tight thing. Its the only organization from which I regularly hear good news. Just because sometimes they make mid steps doesn’t mean they’re the devil. World wide, it currently is the best we have.
This age verification shit is literallyhappening everywhere, so dunking on the EU for also doing it is disingenuous at best. That they require hardware attestation for that is more a “if you do something, do it well”, so in this case “if you do something stupid, do it very well”
Just to be clear: fuck everything about this, but I’m not so small minded to throw the entire idea of the EU off a cliff just because they do something stupid
Edit: this goes without even talking about how without the EU, Russia would simply start picking off state after state because fuck genocide Putin
It’s a totalitarian move aimed only at establishing a police state for the average people. It will not affect the criminals or terrorists in the least. They’ve managed to figure out how to operate without cell phone tracking apparently. Seems the gadgetcops need to figure out how to do real police work again. I’m sure a few guys in their 60s-80s might remember how it was done before the gadgets showed up
The Linux + open source community has more potential to be a historic force than the Eurasian Peninsula, and all first world socialists combined. One will be erased, replaced, the better one consumed and made use of.
I am not joking btw
I have a solution to the age verification problem. There is a way to affirmatively prove someone is a real human adult without invasions of privacy. We can use the same ID verification system we’ve been using for centuries: public notaries.
Governments could hand anonymous cryptographic tokens to notaries. These contain no information on the individual. They’re simply a unique cryptographic token. You can go to a notary, pay a nominal fee, show your ID, and grab one of the tokens (possibly just a code printed on a card) from a large bin of them. You can then use this token to register for any number of sites. The notary themselves does not need to note which cryptographic token you grab. The notary doesn’t even know what token you received. The goal is merely to prove you’re an adult human, not to create a cryptographic key tied to your specific identity.
I would then let people do this as many times as they want. You can get a hundred such IDs. They wouldn’t cost much, a few dollar or Euros. This would be no barrier to individuals accessing the net, but it would make them unsuitable for mass spamming.
No. There is zero need for this shit, don’t normalize it.
There is a clear need for it. There’s value in having online discussion spaces that aren’t just swamped with bots. We really need a reliable way of telling human from bot. I want to find a way to do that preserves privacy to the greatest degree possible.
Do you have any constructive criticism to offer? Maybe a suggested improvement, or an alternative way to accomplish the same goal? What’s your solution to separate human from bot?
There is no need for it. Sorry. Certainly not government mandated, which is the worst part.
Frankly if you treat the internet like we did all the way back in bbs days, it doesn’t matter that much: Everyone is a liar. So I don’t care what anyone says. Bot or not.
In the forums I run we haven’t seen much of a bot presence at all, so these spaces already exist. How do I know? We have all met each other at one point or another. So I may know a, a knows b, and so on.
Do I want the burden of starting authentication on top of this? No.
I don’t want the internet to require me to get authentication. I really don’t care about the bot issue. Go outside and meet people in real life if that’s what you want.
YOU have no need of it. You’re projecting your experiences onto everyone else. Maybe you’re content only hanging out in limited forums where you have to know someone to join. And those forums can continue to operate without any human verification. If you don’t care whether the spaces you occupy are infested with bots, or can manage with white lists, fine. But most people don’t want to talk to bots. Not everyone has the social connections you do.
I don’t support mandating ID for anything. But you are not the only person in the world. Just because you have no need of it, doesn’t mean no one does. Not everyone uses the internet the same way you do.
“Only join forums where you personally know the people there” is not a scalable solution to this problem.
Respect a diversity of viewpoints and experiences. Your way is not the only way.
But then how are you supposed to surveil citizens?
It would only work if the law mandated that this token cannot be stored or tracked across the web.
Gee. I totally not saw that coming.
These people who push for it are fascists, and the only way to deal with fascists is to kill them before they murder you.
How I see it, ocurres when the laws are made by ancients which confuse an remote control with an smartphone.
Cool. Have fun trying to enforce it.
even if you are forced to use their stuff for banking, state services and increasingly more?
at best we are looking at having private devices separate from corporate ones. we’d need both devices and services that are ours.
I’m already largely of the opinion this is necessary.
The whole thing is wrongheaded in the first place; any child wanting to access adult-only content will use an adult’s account to do so; any adult attempting to access adult-only content is likewise going to use an adult’s account.
So unless they’re tying this to biometrics that are actually secure against an adverserial child, all the system really does is creates a registry of adults. And we already have those.
Creating a registry of adults and what content they access is exactly the point of these laws. Always has been. “Protecting children” is just the easiest excuse to make it seem more urgent to violate people’s rights. Just like removing trans healthcare started with children and is now targeting adults.
Thing is, it doesn’t create a registry of what content adults access. Just what content their registered identity accesses.
But in most cases, it is, because most adults are not that technically inclined to get around the logins. Sure there are some tech savvy ones who will bypass it. And maybe a few kids who will use their parents’ accounts rather than just bypassing the logins but it’s still the family accessing the information, but for the majority, it does work as a registry. And though it’s only on a few categories of sites now, the categories inevitably will expand. It’s not just porn, but info on reproductive and gender healthcare, LGBTQ+ dating, and many other subjects that “children must me protected from”, but really they want to know who’s gay, looking for abortions or transgender healthcare or information about whatever other rights their government is trying to force them to give up.
Yes. And perhaps, given time, accessing the wrong version of certain sensitive historic events could even be tracked that way.
It already is. In China if you access information on the Tiananmen Square massacre it has gotten you flagged for ages. In the US, if you access pro-Palastine information or abortion information, these things are then used to prove you are antisemitic or trying to get an abortion where it’s illegal, etc. The easier it is to link that access to an individual through a registry, the more commonly it will be used.