My stance is that if somebody is a minor, his/her/their parents/tutors/legal guardian are responsible for what they can/cannot do online, and that the mechanism to enforce that is parental control on devices.
Having said that, open-source zero-knowledge proofs are infinitely less evil (I refuse to say "better") than commercial cloud-based age monitoring baked into every OS
Meh, I use it, but it's super annoying and I think that with my Daughter I'll take a different approach (but it will be some years before that is relevant).
On Android: The kid can easily go on Snapchat (after approval of install of course, and then you can just see their "friends") before Pokemon Go (just a pain to get working, it keeps presenting some borked version which led to a lot of confusion at first). I just lied about his age in a bunch of places at some point. Snapchat is horrible and sick from our experiences in the first week.
On Windows: It's a curated set of websites (and no FireFox) or access to everything. It's not even workable for just school. Granting kids access to our own minercraft servers: My god, I felt dirty about what the other parents had to go through to enable that.
This is a hobby horse of mine to the point that coworkers probably wish I'd just stfu about Minecraft - but holy shit is it crazy how many different things you need to get right to get kids playing together.
I genuinely have no idea how parents without years of "navigating technical bullshit" experience ever manage to make it happen. Juggling Microsoft accounts, Nintendo accounts, menu-diving through one of 37 different account details pages , Xbox accounts, GamePass subscriptions - it's just fucking crazy!
Getting an actual kids account to work online with minecraft involves setting the right permissions across 2-4 websites and 1-3 companies. I think it took me around 4 hours of trial and error to get it working.
I'm essentially the maintainer of a series of accounts for each kid, these days. Woe unto anyone without a password manager!
To be honest, I worry that the framing of this legislation and ZKP generally presents a false dichotomy, where second-option bias[1] prevails because of the draconian first option.
There's always another option: don't implement age verification laws at all.
App and website developers shouldn't be burdened with extra costly liability to make sure someone's kids don't read a curse word, parents can use the plethora of parental controls on the market if they're that worried.
[1] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Appeal_to_the_minority#Second-...
Where do you go to vote for this option?
Why not? Physical businesses have liability if they provide age restricted items to children. As far as I know, strip clubs are liable for who enters. Selling alcohol to a child carries personal criminal liability for store clerks. Assuming society decides to restrict something from children, why should online businesses be exempt?
On who should be responsible, parents or businesses, historically the answer has been both. Parents have decision making authority. Businesses must not undermine that by providing service to minors.
This implies the creation of an infrastructure for the total surveillance of citizens, unlike age verification by physical businesses.
How do you reconcile porn sites as a line in the sand with things like banking or online real estate transactions or applying for an apartment already performing ID checks? The verification infrastructure is already in place. It's mundane. In fact the apartment one is probably more offensive because they'll likely make you do their online thing even if you could just walk in and show ID.
I mean, we're talking about age verification in the OS itself in some of these laws, so tell me how it doesn't.
Quantity is a quality. We're not just seeing it for porn, it's moving to social media in general. Politicians are already talking about it for all sites that allow posts, that would include this site.
So you tell me.
California is also stupid for creating liability for service/app providers that don't even deal in age restricted apps, like calculators or maps. It's playing right into the "this affects the whole Internet/all of computing" narrative when in fact it's really a small set of businesses that are causing issues and should be subject to regulation.
There is also the problem of mission creep. Once the infrastructure is in place, to control access to age-restricted content, other services might become out of reach. In particular, anonymous usage of online forums might no longer be possible.
OS-level ability to verify the age of the person using it absolutely provides infrastructure for the OS to verify all sorts of other things. Citizenship, identity, you name it. When it's at the OS level there's no way to do anything privately on that machine ever again.
Ok, suppose the strip club is the website, and the club's door is the OS.
Would you fine the door's manufacturer for teens getting into the strip club?
How do we fight? It seems like agree or disagree, this isn't going to stop. There's so much money behind it in a time where the have nots can barely survive as is.
These are often clear cut. They're physical controlled items. Tobacco, alcohol, guns, physical porn, and sometimes things like spray paint.
The internet is not. There are people who believe discussions about human sexuality (ie "how do I know if I'm gay?") should be age restricted. There are people who believe any discussion about the human form should be age restricted. What about discussions of other forms of government? Plenty would prefer their children not be able to learn about communism from anywhere other than the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.
The landscape of age restricting information is infinitely more complex than age restricting physical items. This complexity enables certain actors to censor wide swaths of information due to a provider's fear of liability.
This is closer to a law that says "if a store sells an item that is used to damage property whatsoever, they are liable", so now the store owner must fear the full can of soda could be used to break a window.
So again, assuming we have decided to restrict something (and there are clear lines online too like commercial porn sites, or sites that sell alcohol (which already comes with an ID check!)), why isn't liability for online providers the obvious conclusion?
The crux is we cannot decide what is protected speech, and even things that are protected speech are still considered adult content.
> why isn't liability for online providers the obvious conclusion?
We tried. The providers with power and money(Meta) are funding these bills. They want to avoid all liability while continuing to design platforms that degrade society.
This may be a little tin-foil hat of me, but I don't think these bills are about porn at all. They're about how the last few years people were able to see all the gory details of the conflict in Gaza.
The US stopped letting a majority of journalists embed with the military. In the last few decades it's been easier for journalists to embed with the Taliban than the US Military.
The US Gov learned from Vietnam that showing people what they're doing cuts the domestic support. I've seen people suggesting it's bad for Bellingcat to report on the US strike of the girls school because it would hurt morale at home.
The end goal is labeling content covering wars/conflicts as "adult content". Removing any teenagers from the material reality of international affairs, while also creating a barrier for adults to see this content. Those who pass the barrier will then be more accurately tracked via these measures.
Plenty of people would prefer that children not learn about scientology from pro-scientology cultists too. It's not that they can't know about scientology (they probably should, in fact, because knowledge can have an immunizing effect against cults)...
And it's not that they can't know about communism (they probably should, in fact, because knowledge can have an immunizing effect against cults)...
This is a comment section about large corporations lobbying against our ability to freely use computers and you break out the 80's cold war propaganda edition of understanding a complicated economic system that intertwines with methodology for historical analysis with various levels of implementations from a governmental level.
You're either a mark or trying to find a mark.
Anatomical reference material for artists with real nude models?
What about Sexual education materials? Medical textbooks?
Women baring their breasts in NYC where it's legal?
Where is the clear cut line of Pornography? At what point do we say any depiction of a human body is pornographic?
Physical businesses nominally aren't selling their items to people across state or country borders.
Of course, we threw that out when we decided people could buy things online. How'd that tax loophole turn out?
It turned out we pretty much closed the tax loophole. I don't remember an online purchase with no sales tax since the mid 00s.
App and website operators should add one static header. [1] That's it, nothing more. Site operators could do this in their sleep.
User-agents must look for said header [1] and activate parental controls if they were enabled on the device by a parent. That's it, nothing more. No signalling to a website, no leaking data, no tracking, no identifying. A junior developer could do this in their sleep.
None of this will happen of course as bribery (lobbying) is involved.
Surely you can find a rationalwiki article for your fallacy too.
In fact, I suspect adults, and not just children, would also appreciate it if the pervasive surveillance was simply banned, instead of trying to age gate it. Why should bad actors be allowed to prey on adults?
Also, I heard the same thing about video games, TV shows, D&D, texting and even youth novels. It's yet another moral panic.
From the Guardian[1]:
> Social media time does not increase teenagers’ mental health problems – study
> Research finds no evidence heavier social media use or more gaming increases symptoms of anxiety or depression
> Screen time spent gaming or on social media does not cause mental health problems in teenagers, according to a large-scale study.
> With ministers in the UK considering whether to follow Australia’s example by banning social media use for under-16s, the findings challenge concerns that long periods spent gaming or scrolling TikTok or Instagram are driving an increase in teenagers’ depression, anxiety and other mental health conditions.
> Researchers at the University of Manchester followed 25,000 11- to 14-year-olds over three school years, tracking their self-reported social media habits, gaming frequency and emotional difficulties to find out whether technology use genuinely predicted later mental health difficulties.
From Nature[2]:
> Time spent on social media among the least influential factors in adolescent mental health
From the Atlantic[3] with citations in the article:
> The Panic Over Smartphones Doesn’t Help Teens, It may only make things worse.
> I am a developmental psychologist[4], and for the past 20 years, I have worked to identify how children develop mental illnesses. Since 2008, I have studied 10-to-15-year-olds using their mobile phones, with the goal of testing how a wide range of their daily experiences, including their digital-technology use, influences their mental health. My colleagues and I have repeatedly failed to find[5] compelling support for the claim that digital-technology use is a major contributor to adolescent depression and other mental-health symptoms.
> Many other researchers have found the same[6]. In fact, a recent[6] study and a review of research[7] on social media and depression concluded that social media is one of the least influential factors in predicting adolescents’ mental health. The most influential factors include a family history of mental disorder; early exposure to adversity, such as violence and discrimination; and school- and family-related stressors, among others. At the end of last year, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released a report[8] concluding, “Available research that links social media to health shows small effects and weak associations, which may be influenced by a combination of good and bad experiences. Contrary to the current cultural narrative that social media is universally harmful to adolescents, the reality is more complicated.”
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/jan/14/social-media-t...
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s44220-023-00063-7
[3] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/05/candi...
[5] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31929951/
[6] https://www.nature.com/articles/s44220-023-00063-7#:~:text=G...
[7] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32734903/
[8] https://nap.nationalacademies.org/resource/27396/Highlights_...
The 2 billion dollars are the one twisting it.
The real answer to the problem is for websites/appstores to publish tags that are legally binding assertions of age appropriateness, and then browsers/systems can be configured to use those tags to only show appropriate content to their intended user.
This also gives parents the ability to additionally decide other types of websites are not suitable for their children, rather than trusting websites themselves to make that decision within the context of their regulatory capture. For example imagine a Facebook4Kidz website that vets posts as being age appropriate, but does nothing to alleviate the dopamine drip mechanics.
There has been a market failure here, so it wouldn't be unreasonable for legislation to dictate that large websites must implement these tags (over a certain number of users), and that popular mobile operating systems / browsers implement the parental controls functionality. But there would be no need to cover all websites and operating systems - untagged websites fail as unavailable in the kid-appropriate browsers, and parents would only give devices with parental controls enabled to their kids.
Agreed, recycling a comment: on reasons for it to be that way:
___________
1. Most of the dollar costs of making it all happen will be paid by the people who actually need/use the feature.
2. No toxic Orwellian panopticon.
3. Key enforcement falls into a realm non-technical parents can actually observe and act upon: What device is little Timmy holding?
4. Every site in the world will not need a monthly update to handle Elbonia's rite of manhood on the 17th lunar year to make it permitted to see bare ankles. Instead, parents of that region/religion can download their own damn plugin.
To expand on your #3, it also gives parents a way to have different policies on different devices for the same child. Perhaps absolutely no social media on their phone (which is always drawing them, and can be used in private when they're supposed to be doing something else), but allowing it on a desktop computer in an observable area (ie accountability).
The way the proposed legislation is made, once companies have cleared the hurdle of what the law requires, parents are then left up to the mercy of whatever the companies deem appropriate for their kids. Which isn't terribly surprising for regulatory capture legislation! But since it's branded with protecting kids and helping parents, we need to be shouting about all the ways it actually undermines those goals.
Recent posters here are clear that porn sites are setting every available signal that they are serving adult-only content.
According to them, you are targeting the wrong audience.
Facebook/Instagram studying how to get young users addicted should be of greater concern. I have my doubts about the effectiveness of age-based blocking there, though.
Yeah quite the opposite. Once they have that formalized attestation they will move in like sharks.
So on the Sony consoles I created an account for my child and guess what they have implemented some stuff to block children from adult content on some stuff.
So if Big Tech would actually want to prevent laws to be created could make it easy for a parent to setup the account for a child (most children this days have mobile stuff and consoles so they could start with those), we just need the browsers to read the age flag from the OS and put it in a header, then the websites owners can respect that flag.
I know that someone would say that some clever teen would crack their locked down windows/linux to change the flag but this is a super rare case, we should start with the 99% cases, mobile phones and consoles are already locked down so an OS API that tells the browser if this is an child account and a browser header would solve the issue, most porn websites or similar adult sites would have no reason not to respect this header , it would make their job easier then say Steam having to always popup a birth date thing when a game is mature.
Let's go back to parenting: yes, world is a scary place if you get into it unprepared.
> Nearly 75% of 12th grade students...have consumed alcohol in their lifetimes.
> 85 percent of 12th graders ... say it would be “fairly easy” or “very easy” for them to get alcohol.
Permission restricted registry entry (already exists) and a syscall that reads it (already exists) for windows and a file that requires sudo to edit (already exists) and a syscall to read it (already exists). Works on every distro automatically as well including android phones since they run the linux kernel anyway. Apple can figure it out and they already have appleid.
> give parents the ABILITY to advertise the users age to browsers, apps and everything in between.
Accounts and Applications to services that provide countent are set to a country-specific age rating restrictions (PG, 12+, 18+, whatever). That's it.
None of the things you mentioned have any point to concern themself with the age or age-bracket of the user in front of the device. This can and will be abused. This is very obvious. Think about it.
Clarification: "are set to" means by the parent. "Accounts and Applications to services that provide countent" like media content providing apps like discord, netflix, etc. that ARE able and/or bound to rate their content.
Package Manager and Software Installation in general are usually locked behind root/admin passwords anyway. Especially on kids' devices their user should be non-admin, no?
So, when any piece of software is installed, it is by choice of the parent.
That's not unreasonable then?
Responsibility should be on the website to not provide the content if the header is sent with an inappropriate age, and for the parent to set it up on the device, or to not provide a child a device without child-safe restrictions.
It seems very obviously simple to me, and I don't see why any of these other systems have gained steam everywhere all of a sudden (apart from a desire to enhance tracking).
(if there are further restrictions then it gets messy, but I feel like that's the current state of things anyways? at least for online services which I'm mostly speaking about here.)
Mostly my point is I don't think attestation is required. I think that responsibility should fall upon parents, and I don't want to have to give my ID to any online sites, because I don't remotely trust them to keep that safe. I'm less worried about them storing a number I send them about how old I am.
And 50 US states.
Having no restrictions would be great, but since a bunch of countries are passing these laws I'd appreciate having a minimally invasive version instead.
As a parent, sure, that is my stance as well. What... what other stances are there even? How would they work?
But the implementation matters, and almost all of these bills internationally are being done in bad faith by coordinated big-money groups against technologically illiterate and reactionary populist governments.
(if we really want to get into an argument, there's what the UK calls "Gillick competence": the ability of children to seek medical treatment without the knowledge and against the will of their parents)
Maybe a majority of people today agree with that, but I know I don't and I never hear that assumption debated directly.
The idea of the "nanny state" has been debated a lot, and this seems like a very literal example of that. But once some status quo is firmly entrenched, debate about it tends to die down because the majority of people no longer care enough about it.
I would personally favour allowing parents to buy drinks for children below the current limits (18 without a meal, 16 for wine, beer and cider with a meal).
The alternative to this is empowering parents by regulating SIM cards (child safe cards already exist) and allowing parents to control internet connectivity either through the ISP or at the router - far better than regulating general purpose devices. The devices come with sensible defaults that parents can change.
TBH many parents done exactly that by giving phones/tablet already to kids in strollers
"You‘re reading about evolution! Not in my house"
Examples: most children believe in the same religion as their parents, and can visit friends and places only if/when allowed by their parents.
This is simply extending the same level of control to the internet.
Government-mandated restrictions are completely another level.
Who controls your age if you want to see an R-rated movie?
This is simply extending the same level of control to the internet.
More control for parents is a completely different level.
Does the US have a zero-knowledge proof system that is mentioned in the discussion?
They rarely enforce it, but if it gets out of hand, the city will start getting on your case about it.
> Having said that, open-source zero-knowledge proofs are infinitely less evil (I refuse to say "better") than commercial cloud-based age monitoring baked into every OS
Parent prefers more control by parents over zero-knowledge proof
I do think parental controls can be and are abused for evil, but they're still better than the alternative. Zero-knowledge proof is not an alternative, and to suggest that it is is misunderstanding the situation. These laws are proposed and funded by people who want complete surveillance of the population. Zero-knowledge proof is, therefore, explicitly contrary to the goal and will never be implemented under any circumstances. Suggesting that it can be muddies the issue and tricks people into supporting legislation that exists only to be used against them.
In a benevolent dictatorship, sure, go for a zero-knowledge proof verification as your solution. In the reality of democracy, where politicians are corporate puppets who cloak surveillance laws in "think of the children" to rally support from the masses, we need to convince people to see through the lie and reject the proposals outright while reassuring them that they can protect the children themselves via parental controls. You will never be able to sufficiently inform 50.1% of the population of any country of what zero-knowledge proof even means, let alone convince them to support age verification laws but strictly conditional on ZKP requirements. That level of nuance is far too much to ask of millions of people who are not technically-informed, and idealism needs to give way to pragmatism if we wish to avoid the worst-case scenario.
Imho there is a place for regulation in that, actually. Devices that parents are managing as child devices could include an OS API and browser HTTP header for "hey is this a child?" These devices are functionally adminned by the parent so the owner of the device is still in control, just not the user.
Just like the cookie thing - these things should all be HTTP headers.
"This site is requesting your something, do you want to send it?
Y/N [X] remember my choice."
Do that for GPS, browser fingerprint, off-domain tracking cookies (not the stupid cookie banner), adulthood information, etc.
It would be perfectly reasonable for the EU to legislate that. "OS and browsers are required to offer an API to expose age verification status of the client, and the device is required to let an administrative user set it, and provide instructions to parents on how to lock down a device such that their child user's device will be marked as a child without the ability for the child to change it".
Either way, though, I'm far more worried about children being radicalized online by political extremists than I am about them occasionally seeing a penis. And a lot of radicalizing content is not considered "adult".
I owe everything about who I am today to learning how to circumvent firewalls and other forms of restriction. I would almost certainly be dead if I hadn't learned to socialize and program on the web despite it being strictly forbidden at home. Most of my interests, politics and personality were forged at 2am, as quiet as possible, browsing the web on live discs. I now support myself through those interests.
We're so quick to forget that kids are people, too. And today, they often know how to safely navigate the internet better than their aging caretakers who have allowed editorial "news" and social media to warp their minds.
Even for people who think they're really doing a good thing by supporting these kinds of insane laws that are designed to restrict our 1A rights: the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Morals like owning slaves, right?
A moral system that requires everyone to be white Christian males isn't a moral system, it's a theocracy.
With no proof it will protect anyone from proven harm.
Why is this such a sticking point in US politics? If the "undocumented" people aren't supposed to be in the country in the first place, why should rest of society cater to them? Even if you're against age verification for other reasons, dragging in the immigration angle is just going to alienate the other half of the population who don't share your view on undocumented people, and is a great way to turn a non-partisan issue into a partisan one. It's kind of like campaigning for medicare for all, and then listing "free abortions and gender affirming surgery" as one of the arguments for it.
Great, frame it as "poor people without IDs" or whatever, not "undocumented", which in the current political discourse is basically the left's version of the term "illegal immigrant".
>You might be in the country temporarily for business or as a tourist. The constitution applies to all of these people.
The constitutional right to... watch 18+ videos on youtube while in the US?
We _do not want_ the government to have the capability to enforce laws of this nature.
Because these undocumented people are still humans. They deserve access to information services. It's as simple as that.
This means "not having documents". It's not a synonym for "illegal immigrant".
"Undocumented" doesn't mean "residing illegally" anyway, it just means "lacking documents", which is a state that many perfectly legitimate US citizens find themselves in. But we should want people who are here illegally and everyone else to be able to use the world wide web and computers regardless of their legal status, just like everyone should be allowed to eat and buy food regardless of their legal status, because that's just basic humanity.
Which is kind of my point. Don't say it's a bad idea because "undocumented people" won't be able to get food, say it's bad because it'll be a pain for everyone.
>"Undocumented" doesn't mean "residing illegally" anyway, it just means "lacking documents", which is a state that many perfectly legitimate US citizens find themselves in. But we should want people who are here illegally and everyone else to be able to use the world wide web and computers regardless of their legal status, just like everyone should be allowed to eat and buy food regardless of their legal status, because that's just basic humanity.
But if you're undocumented, it's already a massive pain to participate in society. You can't get a bank account or any other sort of financial product, can't get a job (Form I-9, or want to do background checks), can't buy real estate (who are you going to register it to?), or even drive (yes, I know some states issue drivers licenses to "undocumented" migrants, but that makes them documented and irrelevant to this discussion). Therefore you're going to have a hard time garnering sympathy from voters. An analogy to this would be all the government forms that require a telephone number or an address. Is it illegal to not have a telephone number or an address? No. Do many people not have a phone number or address? Also yes. Is "let's abolish phone numbers and addresses on government forms" a good issue to run on? No.
Good thing I'm not running for office, and instead am merely having a conversation on the internet. I would vote for someone running on that issue, though!
> But if you're undocumented, it's already a massive pain to participate in society.
So I should be fine with any changes that embiggens that pain? I am not.
I'm not "fine" with it, but when there are trade-offs to be made, I'm definitely going to weigh that side less. Some people browse the web with javascript disabled. It's already a huge pain to browse the web with javascript disabled. With those two factors in mind, if I'm deciding whether to add javascript fallbacks (eg. SSR) on for my next project, I'm going to weigh the interests of the "javascript disabled" people very low. I don't have any animus against them, but at the same time I'm not going out of my way to cater to them either.
That said, government agencies have been doing a terrible job at keeping the private information of citizens safe. But it is nowhere nearly as bad as the US. My best childhood friend died in very questionable circumstances in 2009 in the US in very questionable circumstances. He had a US citizenship and we never really found out what had happened(to the point where we never really got any definitive proof that he had died). But that didn't stop me from trying and I was blown away by the fact that I could log into a US government website, register with a burner mail, pay 2 bucks with an anonymous gift credit/debit card and get a scanned copy of his death certificate in my email. And I didn't even have to provide his passport/id/anything. Just his name.
Point is, the US has been terrible at privacy for as long as I can remember. It is probably worse now with Facebook and Ellison holding TikTok.
Surely you meant this as hyperbole, right? If not, I would love your reasoning as to why its a bigger threat than literally anything and anyone else.
Reasoning: experience.
But they invest large amounts of money to propaganda channels everywhere, have direct military influence in large parts of Africa, are known to poison people in the UK and elsewhere, etc.
> its relative strength has only lessened over the decades Russia is not a _physical_ threat outside of its immediate proximity.
But they invest large amounts of money to propaganda channels everywhere, have direct military influence in large parts of Africa, are known to poison people in the UK and elsewhere, etc.
> Is it not?
No, and no part of your comment really seems to argue otherwise? I know about current world events. Your argument was that "experience" is a good enough reason to make a blanket statement about a country and all its people, and you doubled down on it, so it's not even like I'm constructing a strawman here or anything.
It's just wild to me how far this kind of blind hate goes. If "experience" is enough to say that a country is a bigger threat to civilization(!) than, lets say, pandemics, natural disasters, global nuclear war, etc., then there really remains no basis for any kind of healthy discussion. At that point it's just blind hatred.
I'm trying to steer the conversation to stay factual, because I usually appreciate HN for its clear communication style. Sorry for offending you and I'm sorry if I've caused you further suffering. Let's not continue this conversation.
I keep hearing this but I struggle to find any sources, beyond articles like [1] which are... not particularly good sources, even a reddit comment would be a better primary source than that.
I'm not trying to be combative, I just genuinely struggle to find primary sources, probably because I'm using the wrong keywords or something.
I understand the reasoning, but I would love to actually see/read/hear/whatever where Putin "states" this desire explicitly!
[1] https://gppreview.com/2015/02/12/putins-dream-reborn-ussr-un...
Surely I'm missing something here. Putin's 2023 "The Concept of the Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation" also does not state conquering back former USSR states. Where is it? If he states it so clearly that people keep quoting it, surely there must be a source for it? Sorry if I'm a PITA.
To be clear, I'm interested in this because this would be a fantastic argument to bring to discussions, but without having seen a source, I don't think I could.
I think Dugin's book is like that. Sure, Dugin said it, not Putin. But IIRC Putin did some things to make Dugin's book more influential. I forget the specifics - making it required reading in the Russian military academies, maybe?
There have been other statements by Russian politicians who are widely regarded as Putin's mouthpieces. Medvedev, certain key figures in the Russian parliament. I know I've seen that, though I don't recall the specifics.
So Putin maybe didn't say it. And yet, his endorsed mouthpieces (more than one) do say it.
You said "without having seen a source". Well, I didn't give you one. But if you want to look, I have given some places to start.
> making it required reading in the Russian military academies, maybe
Yeah, I think he did.
> So Putin maybe didn't say it.
That's my concern. When people make the statement that he did, when he didn't, they essentially preempt any reasonably discussion and start it off on the entirely wrong foot.
If I want to have a discussion with my neighbor about him not cleaning up his own trash, surely I would not start the discussion with "you LOVE living in trash, don't you", even if I can reasonably deduce that he does. It just turns the entire discussion hostile to make claims that aren't supported, and it weakens all subsequent arguments!
So I don't think it's the entirely wrong foot. It's a shortcut and an imprecision, but the point (that Putin actually thinks this) seems to be valid. (Though one should have less than 100% certainty that it represents his position - but with Putin, that should apply to a direct quote as well.)
You have to remember how political communication works in Russia. They rarely state goals outright, and always juggle several narratives at the same time. To make it hard to pin them down to any position and achieve exactly what is happening here.
[0] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_the_Historical_Unity_of_Ru...
I don't mean to be the average gloating US citizen, but I'm pretty sure we're the largest threat to the Earth.
The root of the problem is Russia, always has been.
So, I suppose if they could somehow use money and influence to determine election results, they would use it in Russia, no?
So, I think the civilizational threat from Russia is about the same as from North Korea: nearly zero.
The key question is whether AIPAC is taking actions at "the direction or control” of Israel, but the money is pretty clearly not being sourced from Israel.
I don't know about elsewhere but in the UK anyone can apply for any death certificate going back to 1837.
Death certificates become public record after a period of time, depending on the state. In some states it’s 25 years after death, some more, some less.
https://www.usa.gov/death-certificate#:~:text=Can%20anyone%2...
As far as I can tell this is the same as in the EU: Death certificates can be publicly accessed for a fee after a period of time defined by member states.
I found some comments saying death certificates in the UK could be accessed as early as 6 months in some locations.
So I don’t see this as the US being uniquely terrible on privacy. This is how most of the western world does it. You just had experience with the US and assumed EU was different.
> we never really found out what had happened(to the point where we never really got any definitive proof that he had died).
I’m sorry for your loss, but doesn’t this imply that the US did do a good job of protecting his privacy? It wasn’t until the time limit had passed that you were able to find the death certificate.
once you get this you stop asking why the tech details are the way they are.
Other states are even worse, creating another way to have your buddy buddy lobbyist folks fire up a new business opportunity to make money as a verification service.
In a true zero-knowledge system sharing falsely shared credentials becomes easy because it’s untraceable. If the proof has no knowledge attached, you can’t conclude who used their credentials on a website that generates proof-of-age tokens on demand for visitors.
When we hear about “zero knowledge” ID checks in real proposals they’re not actually zero knowledge altogether. They have built in limits or authorities to prevent these obvious attacks, like requiring them to interact with government servers and then pinky promising that those government servers won’t log your requests.
Its billions of lobbying for state surveillance under a smokescreen you bypass with basic human interaction.
The only authority that can be trusted to do age verification is the government.
You know, those people who give you birth certificates, passports, SSNs, driver's licenses, etc.
The idea that parental supervision here is sufficient has been shown to be wholly inadequate. I'm sorry but that train has sailed. Age verification is coming. It's just a question of who does it and what form it takes.
Take Youtube, for example. I think it should work like this:
1. If you're not of sufficient age, you simply don't see comments. At all;
2. Minors shouldn't see ads. At all;
3. Videos deemed to have age-restricted content should be visible;
4. If you're not logged in, you're treated as an age-restricted user; and
5. Viewing via a VPN means you need age verification regardless of your country of origin.
It's not perfect. It doesn't have to be.
Judges in other countries (Texas) found out this kind of law was a violation of the Free Speech.
Since when Free Speech do not apply to -16y old?
Made laws are made, then killed by courts later one.
Not exactly a good moment for this particular caste of politicians/elites to pretend they care about children's well-being!
The benefit of zero-knowledge proofs is that the hide information about the ID and who it belongs to.
That’s also a limitation for how useful they are as an ID check mechanism. At the extreme, it reduces to “this user has access to an ID of someone 18+”. If there is truly a zero-knowledge construction using cryptographic primitives then the obvious next step is for someone to create an ad-supported web site where you click a button and they generate a zero-knowledge token from their ID for you to use. Zero knowledge means it can’t be traced back to them. The entire system is defeated.
This always attracts the rebuttal of “there will always be abuse, so what?” but when abuse becomes 1-click and accessible to every child who can Google, it’s not a little bit of abuse. It’s just security theater.
So the real cryptographic ID implementations make compromises to try to prevent this abuse. You might be limited to 3 tokens at a time and you have to request them from a central government mechanism which can log requests for rate limiting purposes. That’s better but the zero-knowledge part is starting to be weakened and now your interactions with private services require an interaction with a government server.
It’s just not a simple problem that can be solved with cryptographic primitives while also achieving the actual ID goals of these laws.
And according to the EU Identity Wallet's documentation, the EU's planned system requires highly invasive age verification to obtain 30 single use, easily trackable tokens that expire after 3 months. It also bans jailbreaking/rooting your device, and requires GooglePlay Services/IOS equivalent be installed to "prevent tampering". You have to blindly trust that the tokens will not be tracked, which is a total no-go for privacy.
These massive privacy issues have all been raised on their Github, and the team behind the wallet have been ignoring them.
Zero-knowledge proofs are the way to go for this type of thing, I find it mind-boggling that the US lets itself be bamboozled into complete lack of privacy.