Conceptually, if a proof was truly zero knowledge and there were no restrictions on generating it, there would also be nothing stopping someone from launching a website where you clicked a button and were given a free token generated from their ID. If it was truly a zero knowledge proof it would be impossible to revoke the ID that generated it, so there is no disincentive to freely share IDs.
So every real world “zero knowledge” proof eventually restricts something. Some require you to request your tokens from a government entity. Others try to do hardware attention chains so theoretically you can’t generate them outside of the approved means.
But the hacker fantasy of truly zero knowledge proofs is impossible because 1 hour after launch there would be a dozen “Show HN” posts with vibe coded websites that dispense zero knowledge tokens.
You need some kind of proof system if you need a central authority to certify something, but why is that required? The parents know the age of their kids. They don't need the government to certify that to them. And then the parents can get the kids a device that allows them to set age restrictions.
Whether those restrictions are imposed by the device on content it displays (which is the correct way to do it) or by the device telling the service the approximate age of the user (which needlessly leaks information), you don't actually need a central authority to certify anything to begin with because either way it's just a configuration setting in the child's device.
If I recall correctly, there exist variant cryptographic protocols that let you impersonate a user who provides such a service: that is, the token confers, or can be used to construct something that confers greater privileges in other contexts.
Then this wouldn't be zero knowledge, as it would convey whatever other greater information is available in that other context.
Are you perhaps thinking of the ecash double spending protocols? Where by double spending the same token to two different receivers, you leak enough information for your bank to recover your identity? That wouldn't be applicable here since each token would only be used once, there would just be many generated to share.
At the same time, we have to be real: Online anonymity has significant, real-world drawbacks. I don't think it's reasonable to keep dreaming of the 90s or 00s when the internet was a comparatively innocent place. As society is more and more digitized, the stakes become much, much higher. An information leak 30 years ago was bad, but it had a fairly limited impact radius. Today it can lose you your house, your savings, your relationships, and even your life ("swatting" comes to mind).
This extremely ill-advised legislation across various jurisdictions cannot just be brushed off as a global turn towards fascism. It is that, but there are also real, legitimate concerns that need to be addressed, and the tech world has not leveraged its expertise to come up with any solutions so far. Sticking our head in the sand crying "git gud" while millions get scammed out of their life savings... It's not great.
(Children getting into trouble is honestly the least of my concerns here. Don't let your child go online unsupervised. The internet is not for them. You wouldn't let them roam free in a red light district or an underground illegal weapon's market either, even though they are unlikely to come to any harm.)
Online anonymity has significant, real-world benefits which every doxxed person ever will list for you.
The solution is called a durable power of attorney and then moving significant assets to different financial institutions with estatements. Or the heavyweight option is a living trust.
This problem really has no bearing on mandatory identity verification or locking down software. Scammers leverage generic apps in the app stores just fine.
This problem most certainly is a part of the global turn towards fascism, which is ultimately based on frustrated people demanding easy answers and then empowering those who are able to give them easy answers by lying to them.
To show you that I'm maybe not just blowing smoke out of my ass on this topic, here is me personally dealing with a scammer-adjacent problem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47125550
In USA, small business, small bank and credit unit are often used as excuse to push back these kind of rules.
So you are afraid of minor information leaks getting you killed, but you’re also trying to tell us that online anonymity is a bad thing?
Come on. This argument isn’t even coherent from paragraph to paragraph.
> I don't think it's reasonable to keep dreaming of the 90s or 00s when the internet was a comparatively innocent place
This is such a strange argument as the internet was most definitely NOT an innocent place, even relatively speaking, in that period.
I think there is a lot of nostalgic history rewriting in these claims. Much like political movements that claim that the past was a better time, it’s easy to only remember the good parts of how things were in the past.
I directly quoted your beliefs that minor information leaks on the internet can lose your house and get you killed, as well as your claim that the internet was significantly more innocent in the past.
These were the points you were putting forward along with your insistence that we have to “be real” about the problems of anonymity on the internet.
Its hard for me to believe that you don’t recognize the dissonance between the two points you were putting forward.
Your silly “Are you an American” attempt at an insult or rebuttal reveals the level of conversation you’re having, though.
> So you are afraid of minor information leaks getting you killed, but you’re also trying to tell us that online anonymity is a bad thing?
Which is a really severe misrepresentation of my argument.
My argument is that anonymity has drawbacks, and that it's bad to just ignore those drawbacks.
> Its hard for me to believe that you don’t recognize the dissonance between the two points you were putting forward.
But there absolutely is a dissonance? This is what's called a dilemma: Online anonymity protects some people, and puts other people at risk. If competent people ignore the latter, incompetent people will be trying to solve it instead, so we get these laws.
> Your silly “Are you an American” attempt at an insult or rebuttal reveals the level of conversation you’re having, though.
Sorry about the accusation, it was somewhat flippant. It just seems you and others read an opinion that goes slightly against your own, and immediately you assume that I actually hold the polar opposite opinion, which I don't.
How about this is actually the real problem? Online banking is not worth an omniscient global surveillance state, let alone the immense amount of leverage gained by this digitization.
Do please be specific about those. Provide concrete examples and justify for the class why those involved couldn't have voluntarily done away with anonymity for that particular interaction.
Hypothetically someone can browse a tor site in one tab, post on 4chan in a second one, all while accessing online banking in a third. The bank can use hardware backed 2FA to verify you. Where's the issue here?
Here is one example: It's likely that we will never know who was behind the attempted backdoor in the xz library, which was almost successful in making a huge number of Linux installations worldwide vulnerable to remote exploitation. [1]
That malicious contributor is protected by online anonymity. Now, I know that it's probable that a state actor was behind "Jia Tan", meaning they could have been supplied with a fake ID as well, but that's still a higher barrier.
I don't think (and have not stated) that anonymity is worthless - it definitely is, especially if you're persecuted minority or under other kinds of threat. I just don't think it's helpful to pretend that it is completely unproblematic.
The project in question could have chosen to verify identities if they deemed it worthwhile to do so.
But isn't this exactly what various social media companies are doing now? Choosing "to verify identities" because they have "deemed it worthwhile to do so?"
And don't tell me "the difference is scale", unless you're prepared to explain exactly what difference that makes.
I think people who say this should back it up by posting their full name, date of birth, SSN or other ID number, and address. A phone number would also be helpful so we can call and verify that they made the post. Otherwise they're not being honest.
But this isn't (intellectually) honest, either?
Maybe you can justify asking that they post under their real name, but asking for the kind of information that's required to steal their identity isn't the same as asking them who they are.
(Spring is nearly here and my excuse about my rig also heating my house is about to end. Soon I will be paying extra to run my a/c as my rig pumps out a steady 1000w under load.)
No chips for you, random government. No chips for you either, or you. And you.
Of course you're probably going to say something about how guns and bank accounts are crucial components to crime, in which case the same holds for AI in the mexican telecoms hack.
Once a common technology that everyone has access to becomes powerful enough to alter the lives of others on command, do we as a society just need to do away with the concept of anonymity? We are all just too powerful in isolation, and too much of a threat to the collective, that we cannot reasonably expect not to have some governing body watching at all times?
Today, you can buy parts/print a completely untraceable firearm, so do we license sales of steel tubing and 3D printers?
Considering most places does direct deposit and that requires a bank account (so KYC), I don't see what's particularly new here. Many places also do background and/or work eligibility checks, which again is a form of KYC.
>Today, you can buy parts/print a completely untraceable firearm, so do we license sales of steel tubing and 3D printers?
Fortunately 3d printed guns are bad enough that it's not really an issue, although the bigger threat is probably CNC machines. However that's probably will get a pass, because they're eye-wateringly expensive compared to black market guns that nobody would bother.
Slippery slope is a fallacy, they said.
> Many places also do background and/or work eligibility checks, which again is a form of KYC.
Except that it isn't KYC at all, both because employees aren't customers (most people are the employees of one company but the customers of hundreds or more), and because the majority of people don't have that requirement imposed on them by the government. There are many jobs you can get without a background check.
Buy an 80%, machine it to finish it, and you now have a completely unregistered long rifle with no serial number, and it is completely legal.
It does actually seem like they are an issue - the technology has now been used in several high profile murders and police are reporting seizing them pretty regularly.
I don't think that justifies taking away the freedom to 3D print, but the truth is that if you're committing a crime there are a lot of advantages to a dirt-cheap untraceable nonferrous gun even if it only lasts a few shots.
The issue with centrally registering guns is than when you country is taken over by hostile forces (whether an invading army or a democratically elected abuser who turns it into a dictatorship), they know who has the guns and can force those people to surrender them (politely at first, authoritarians always use a salami slicing technique).
The issue with no controls is that even anti-social and mentally ill people can get them.
I wonder if the right middle ground could be:
- Sellers have to do their due diligence - require ID, proof of psychological examination, whatever else is deemed the right balance.
- Not doing due diligence means they get punishment equal to that for any offense committed with that gun.
- They might be required to mark/stamp the gun so that it can be traced back to them or have witnesses for the transfer.
The first is the mentally ill. Intuitively it seems desirable to say that someone undergoing treatment for e.g. depression shouldn't buy a gun. The problem here is the massive perverse incentive. If you're pretty depressed but you're not inclined to forfeit your ability to buy firearms, you now have a significant incentive to avoid seeking treatment. At which point you can still buy a gun but now your mental illness is going untreated, which is very worse than where we started.
The second is career criminals, i.e. people who have already been convicted of a crime and want to commit another one. The problem here is that career criminals... don't follow laws. If they want a gun they steal one or recruit someone without a criminal record into their gang etc., both of which are actually worse than just letting them buy one.
On top of that, when people get caught, prosecutors generally try to get them to testify against other criminals in exchange for a deal, who are then going to be pretty mad at them. Which gives them a much higher than average legitimate need to exercise their right to self-defense once they get back out. And then you get three independent bad outcomes: If they can't defend themselves they get killed for snitching, if they acquire a gun anyway so they don't then they could go back to prison even if they were otherwise trying to reform themselves, and if they think about this ahead of time or are advised of it by their lawyers then they'll be less likely to cooperate with prosecutors because the other two scenarios that are both bad for them only happen if they snitch.
Meanwhile the proposal was only ever expected to address a minority of the problem to begin with because plenty of the people who do bad things can pass the background check. And if you have a policy that doesn't even solve most of the original problem while creating several new ones, maybe it's just a bad idea?
convicted in any court of a crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year;
who is a fugitive from justice;
who is an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance (as defined in section 102 of the Controlled Substances Act, codified at 21 U.S.C. § 802);
who has been adjudicated as a mental defective or has been committed to any mental institution;
who is an illegal alien;
who has been discharged from the Armed Forces under dishonorable conditions;
who has renounced his or her United States citizenship;
who is subject to a court order restraining the person from harassing, stalking, or threatening an intimate partner or child of the intimate partner;
or who has been convicted of a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence.
The first is the deterrent to reporting, both before and after a conviction. In the original case the victim now can't even report a domestic misdemeanor in the subculture where gun ownership is sacrosanct because either they themselves consider "permanently can't own a gun" too severe a penalty for the crime they were trying to report, or they know the perpetrator will and they're afraid of being booted out into the street or worse if they do it. And for someone who already has a conviction but still has a gun, now the other people in the household can't be calling the police for any reason because if the police find the gun the person keeping a roof over their head is going to prison for years. In general you want the penalties for things to be proportionate and making them disproportionate makes things worse instead of better.
The second is that the victim, or any future victims, are living in the same household as the perpetrator, and then how do you answer this question: Is the victim now prohibited from having a firearm? You're screwed either way, because if you say no you're denying the innocent victim's right to self-defense but if you say yes the perpetrator now has an excuse to have them in the house.
Then these things combine poorly because the overconfident drunk who wants a gun is willing to bet they can convince anyone it belongs to their sweetheart but the sweetheart is nowhere near as confident they can control what happens if they call the police.
FWIW, this is why i said "anti-social" and not criminals in my original post. I think with many habitual abusers, the warning signs are there for a long time (often from childhood) before they break the law and before they are convicted.
> "permanently can't own a gun"
This points to other issues with the current system of punishments. OOH you have people claiming prison is meant for rehabilitation and released prisoners are to be considered fully rehabilitated, having paid their debt (which they argue is to society and not the victim) and not longer a threat to society. OTOH you have the reality that many people are repeat offenders and that also some people can genuinely change (or at least maintain the facade of internal change for the rest of their life).
Maybe what we need is a post-prison evaluation to determine which case we're dealing with and whether restrictions (if any) should be temporary or permanent.
---
FWIW regarding domestic violence, I think any target of it would be crazy to stay with the aggressor in the same household. People who commit it are often deeply and inherently anti-social without a way to treat them. Instead, as a society, we should be looking for ways to ease the process of their targets separating from them permanently. Case studies of what this kind of abuse looks like should be part of primary education, the abuser should be required to pay for housing for a reasonable period of time so the target can move away, etc.
But then what are you proposing to do? Tell people they lose a right based on vibes even though they've never been convicted of anything?
> Maybe what we need is a post-prison evaluation to determine which case we're dealing with and whether restrictions (if any) should be temporary or permanent.
Maybe we should reorient prisons into places that actually rehabilitate prisoners and then release the ones that are actually rehabilitated.
> FWIW regarding domestic violence, I think any target of it would be crazy to stay with the aggressor in the same household.
This is one of the things which is hard for the system to tell from the outside. There are legitimate predators with no record because they have the right friends. Then there are alcoholics who are violent drunks and therefore have a record, but haven't had a drink in ten years and then everything seems fine until they have a relapse. Or the exact same thing except that they stay clean and then everything actually is fine.
There are also people who live with an occasionally violent partner because the alternative was their relentlessly violent parents. I find it hard to judge people who have only bad options and then pick one of them.
> the abuser should be required to pay for housing for a reasonable period of time so the target can move away, etc.
The situation commonly happens to begin with because they're both poor and can only stay above water by sharing accommodations. If you want shelters then build shelters; we don't need things that would only work when the perpetrator has enough money to lawyer their way out of it anyway.
Yep. The issue becomes what do to with those who are not or cannot be rehabilitated. But maybe it would be politically tenable, after all, some places have "three strike laws" which are essentially a heavy handed way to get a similar effect.
> they lose a right based on vibes > hard for the system to tell from the outside
Same issue. The people close to the person know but are hard to prove to outsiders. BTW I wouldn't call it vibes. It's vibes if you've seen it the first time and haven't had any education about cluster B disorders. When you have seen a few people with them and know the names and patterns, you can have a fact based discussion about what drives the person to do what they do and what the probabilities of harmful acts are.
For example, if somebody has a documented pattern of bullying others, especially from childhood, it should reduce their rights unless they prove they have undergone successful treatment. It's common to give child offenders more leeway but I think it should be the opposite. Those who offend from childhood do so because they haven't yet learned to hide their nature and abusers are who they really are internally.
> There are also people who live with an occasionally violent partner because the alternative was their relentlessly violent parents
Maybe the real problem here is housing. The second problem here is that violent (physically or emotionally) people get to keep their property instead of the target, especially when they clearly use the property as leverage against the target.
> enough money to lawyer their way out of it
Yes another systemic issue. We should do studies about the effects of layers on the outcome of cases. Maybe they happen but I haven't heard about any. We should redefine laws to close loopholes and make them as simple as possible so the need for lawyers is reduced as much as possible - I think the need for layers is a symptom/metric of the system not working. We could also cap the allowed spending on layers.
Nitpick but violence is not wrong on its own. Self defense is also violence and should not prevent your from having a gun for next time. Defense of others or reasonable defense of property likewise.
Forcibly removing a person from power who has gained or maintained that power without consent of those he has power over is also violence and even most current states allow us to celebrate it (usually as long as we don't argue it should be repeated against the current government).
Are you saying everyone should be allowed to have a gun?
Because that's genuinely an interesting position. My proposal came from the view that if we need gun control, we should make sure it cannot be abused into a self reinforcing loop where a completely disarmed population is the end state (and possible end goal).
I would be interested if there is research into these indirect effects you talk about. For example I'd like to know how often people actually snitch, whether there are attempts/procedures to protect info about who snitched, how often they are killed for snitching, how often having a gun helps them, etc. E.g. because if a hit can come at any time from anywhere, having a gun might only give a feeling of safety.
We can probably make an exception for people who are currently in prison.
> I would be interested if there is research into these indirect effects you talk about.
This is a political question so all of the research is performed by partisans for one side or the other. On top of that, most of this stuff is inherently hard to measure, e.g.:
> For example I'd like to know how often people actually snitch, whether there are attempts/procedures to protect info about who snitched, how often they are killed for snitching, how often having a gun helps them, etc.
The government is going to try to avoid disclosing who snitches and the criminals are going to try to find out and retaliate. But if the criminals have a way of finding out (e.g. bribe the cops) then it will be illegal and no one will want to admit it's happening, and likewise if they successfully retaliate they'll want to do it a way that doesn't catch them a murder conviction.
So now someone few people are going to notice winds up dead. If they were an informant at some point in the past, those records are closely guarded for obvious reasons, so how is someone trying to collect statistics even supposed to know that? Likewise, if their death is made to look like an accident or the killer is never caught, how do you know how often it was actually an accident or an unrelated crime?
Which then leads into this:
> E.g. because if a hit can come at any time from anywhere, having a gun might only give a feeling of safety.
Part of the premise of having a weapon is as a deterrent, which gives you another measurement problem: If a lot of the snitches are keeping weapons even though they're not allowed to and that's successfully deterring anyone from trying to kill them, neither the snitches nor their hitmen are going to admit to either one because they're both breaking the law.
The lack of anybody having good numbers also feeds into the problem itself, because then the snitches have to guess whether it will help them and a lot of them are going to regard the risk of getting killed as a bigger threat than the risk of getting caught with a gun. Or worse, the hitmen will like their chances better when the law requires their target to be unarmed. And both of those happen stochastically as a result of the inherent uncertainty regardless of your own guess for how effective the victim having a weapon is at deterring retaliation.
Occasionally, gun owners are THE hostile force buying guns explicifely to bully and threaten. But that is about it, really.
That sounds reasonable. A bank can just be an institution that holds money for people; they don't need to be all over their customer's business. It is like a telecom not being responsible for what their customers say. In a simple sense banks don't need KYC.
Nope. That is a storage locker. A bank uses the money it holds for other purposes such as loans or its own investments, possibly returning interest to the depositor. But, most importantly, a bank disperses money. it therefore needs to know who deposits what so that it doesn't eventually release funds to the wrong person. And then there are the lengthy procedures for handing out money without customer permission. People die. Governments garnish wages. Courts order payments to for child support. If you hold money you have to be prepared for this stuff. So you need to be absolutely confident in the identity of everyone you deal with.
Want a simple bank? A bank that doesn't ask for ID? Keep your cash under your mattress. Or put it all in a crypto wallet.
Given that the criminals aren't going to be using the banks it would make sense for the banks to not have mandatory administrative overhead that is easy to avoid.
> Nope. That is a storage locker.
Again, sounds good to me. Let people have a storage locker with a plastic debit card attached. If people had the option of a bank that was a little bit more responsible and didn't roll the dice of total collapse every financial crisis there'd be many that would go for that. Prepper types for example. The discourse glosses over how crazy it is that full-reserve or near-full-reserve banks are soft-banned.
And the same logic about hacks also applies to access to a command line or Linux or a programming language or just a general-purpise computer.
"Given the recent [everything] hacks were [definitely] done with [Python scripts, a Linux distro and a computer with disabled secure boot], it seems [...]"
I hope you get my point.
As for your gun comparison, a gun is a very optional thing and the identification is just for purchase. It's not like a GPS tracker and shot counter is welded onto it at the time of purchase, nor do you need a gun to do the vast majority of everyday tasks.
As for bank KYC, well, I for one am actually not sold on the idea that having to send a blurry photo of my ID and smiling at my phone camera to open a Relovut account is in any way beneficial to society. Terrorism still gets financed, money still gets laundered, taxes still get evaded. But every swipe of my card can and will be used against me by banks, loan providers, advertisers, government agents and eventually also hackers.
Now - wouldn't a government LOVE to know who's saying what? Rather than shutting down the entire $$$$$ international corporate internet.
Money concerns as usual.
One glance and I have your full name, home address, SSN, all online handles and aliases, employment history, email, and phone number, instantaneously on a HUD. It doesn't even need to be marketed as "doxxing as a service;" it can just be marketed as "professional networking" or "social media." That way people will voluntarily submit their information and all rights over it to the platform.
Until people feel their privacy being viscerally raped on a minute to minute basis nothing will change.
1> Auto-nude. Today we can "nudify" photos and videos. Soon, augemented reality glasses will be able to nudify eveyone in real time. (This is totally possible today.)
2> Auto-tranlation. Cool. Everyone can talk to everyone, but users will have censorship options. I don't much like hearing australians so I will just have the glasses make them all sound like proper Texans. And the sound of people with alternative views to my own are replaced with calming country music.
3> Lie detection. Glasses will look for facial/voice body ticks suggestive of deception. Good luck talking your way out of a ticket, or explaining to you boss how you were "sick", when they have a lie detector online 24/7.
4> Censorship of "bad" objects. Signs with ads or news that I do not agree with will be blocked and replaced with more appropriate text. Mosques will appear as churches. Garbage and pollution will become happy birds and clear blue skies. Homeless people will be replaced with attractive young people (see #1 above).
5> Race replacement. I don't like certain races. So my glasses now make everyone Chinese. So long as I don't turn off the glasses, I can live my custom racist utopia.
Live translation seems either better than autonude or worse, but not in the middle of the pack I’d assume? Am I missing something here?
This is what they want to happen with the initial round of "it's just a DOB field bro" legislation. It'll be completely useless, easy to bypass, and annoying to adults. But, everyone will be warming up to this government mandated prompt in their OS. Perfect, now legislators know they have a foundation to work with to introduce "reasonable" amendments to this prompt that require you to upload ID, for example. Frogs in a pot.
I've used the internet for 30 years, built websites etc. I've never been asked ID for general transactions. On the other hand we've had restrictions on porn for kids since before I was born. I'm skeptical much is new.
Right now my personal preference would be a standard for web services certifying content as "kid friendly" combined with a standard for "kid friendly" devices that block uncertified content by default. This would accomplish the alleged goal of blocking children from accessing adult content without infringing on the rights of adults.
It may well be true, and worrying about the possibility that it is is what should motivate people to build alternatives/workarounds.
Find a way to accomplish the stated goal in a way that doesn't erode our rights, and you'll win a lot more people over.
Once people start arguing those measures aren't good enough and that you need to start sacrificing some of your rights in order to keep kids safe, then your position will look a lot more reasonable to moderates when you push back.
In the short term the way it will be implemented is this — age verification will not be a binary, it will also want to push your DoB, name, location etc and they say “the choice is with the user” but the default will be to send everything. Very soon there will be services that require DoB or name or something else to gate new or existing functionality. That is the slippery slope it will be built as and that is how they win the game