If something like this was in widespread use it would have much more impact since countries would see whole swathes of the internet immediately go dark when they make stupid laws.
(ip.src.country eq "GB")
Smart thinking Batman.
Wouldn't work with somewhere like China, but the UK might still be capable of being shamed.
They already can.
> Smart thinking Batman.
“Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.”
But the truth is, we are already there. CloudFlare can already do this, they just won't because the their customers will leave if they violate their trust.
This is a dangerous precedent though that IMO everyone should fight against.
It's how we get the balkanization of the internet, and the death of it as a global network.
TBH we also shouldn't put the onus on blocking "unsafe" countries on the website owners, nor an intermediary like CloudFlare. If a nation wants to block certain content, let the nation deal with it by getting their own ISPs to block and make sure the citizen's anger gets correctly placed on their government and not the site operators.
Makes a lot of sense actually that it’s surprising they don’t have this yet.
But if you're trying to make money through your website... well sorry you're doing business in those countries and I don't have a ton of objection to you needing to follow foreign laws.
I'm fine with "balkanization" (I know some people from the Balkan countries... maybe they'd object to the use of that word) if it means a freedom divide and actual consequences for countries ever eroding freedoms.
Sometimes I think you can ignore the "rules" a bit - they are really guidelines. Your parent was clearly expressing exasperation and engaging effectively and intelligently.
i don't think "compliance" in a micropennies per click market like imgur is a full on "opportunity"
If you place a giant burden such that before you even do anything of value you need to conform to 100s of different laws/regulations from 100 different countries you create a world where only large companies can exist and everyone else is pushed out.
Better to put onus on the customer.
I wouldn't put it passed them to require the digital ID to access the internet passed curfew.
I don’t really understand comments like these. Even if you’re exactly right about how it should work, how would you make this happen in the world we live in? Neither the tech community nor ISPs nor cloud companies decide these things. Just because a matter affects us doesn’t mean we have much of a voice in it especially if it’s legal.
Laws about tech are decided by (idiot) politicians/parties/governments and the consequences are enforced by massive fines, imprisonment, etc. by law enforcement and selective (and often politically motivated) prosecution. In some of the worst places the consequences could include death.
Afghanistan just lost access to the internet almost entirely. China and North Korea are famous for their firewalls. Much of Asia has internet blackouts whenever there are large scale protests. The western world’s government has more legal jurisdiction/economic influence on the companies that run these things and are increasingly leveraging that for their desired censorship.
If the answer to this is democratic influence, the populations of many countries don’t really have that, the majorities in countries that do have it certainly doesn’t know or care about these things and wouldn’t vote for the pro-censorship politicians in the first place if they’d then vote to cut off their nation’s access to uncensored internet while preserving the uncensored variants, and even if the majority ever did care to get the system to work in this way there’s a global trend away from having their opinions on such things matter anyway.
To your point about the proposed service, isn’t that what cloud providers basically already do in rudimentary ways or could do with finer grain regions?
Also, it seems the internet/WWW is basically being snuffed out right before our eyes as governments start using all manner of specious arguments to censor and control adults… for the children… of course. You as an adult are not allowed to have your rights because children may be harmed if you have your rights. “ No, no, we can’t keep the children from engaging in things that we deem harms them, your rights have to be relinquished instead.”
These regulations touch on the following points: {{POINTS}}.
Here are how each of your listed services would likely be impacted by the different components of the regulations:
- {{SERVICE}}
— {{POINTS}}
“””
I just heard about that TikTok has already implement a censorship regime that excludes topics and concepts for which you get a ding on your social credit score. Not even something that was done when China was racially in control of TikTok.
https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/data-protection-and-the...
Say, I'm the provider... well sorry, you (the customer) are doing business with a foreign country (mine) and you should do it in accordance with YOUR laws about YOUR country's foreign trade.
That's the only way to properly conform to jurisdiction, amirite?
In other words, UK has no jurisdiction over US businesses who conduct business from US soil, UK cannot force them to obey UK law just because a UK citizen decided to buy something over the internet. The UK can punish THEIR citizens for what the UK considers unlawful trades and that's always the case no matter what.
Claiming jurisdiction over foreign businesses ends up in a completely lunatic situation where every business, in every country, has to obey the laws of every other country just because some people might decide to order from abroad. Block, ban, punish only where you have jurisdiction, everything else ends up in sheer insanity.
of course defining what “US” business is might be quite challenging, is Apple a US company?! They make nothing in the US and pay no taxes in the US … love this idea though!
Because there are laws for US businesses over which the US government has jurisdiction.
> just punish the consumers/citizens and be done with it.
That happens too, when consumers break the laws that apply to them. In the case of international transactions, the law has to account for the pesky jurisdiction:
It's nothing new, when travelers/consumers go through the customs, THEY are responsible for the goods they import, NOT the party that sold those goods to them! That's the only sane way to do it and it's an established practice, there's no reason to do it differently when a consumer imports something using the internet!
> of course defining what “US” business is might be quite challenging, is Apple a US company?!
Yes it is, also, Apple's branches in other countries are companies under the jurisdiction of those other countries. It's not that complicated.
And as you can see they didn't even bother updating their block after Brexit.
No, you're not? It's pretty obvious that if you try to, say, sell illegal drugs to my citizens, I as a country will come after you even if it's legal on your side.
The internet blurred the lines because you don't "show up" in the buyer's country but there's nothing new here: both seller and buyer need to respect the law.
Not Claudflare though, let's not feed another monster monopoly :)
I totally agree but the UK government – particular Labour – doesn't want people to take responsibility really, because that would take from their own 'power'. There's nothing the UK loves more than a stupid population hooked on benefits and devoid of education, critical thinking and financial freedom.
mullvad basically allows me to go around all the censorship in my country: https://mullvad.net/en
One person I believe knows this, is Keir Starmer. It's very hard to explain why things happen in UK politics without assuming he is trying to tank Labour.
How is someone supposed to benefit from a thing whose only function is to reduce the friction against forcing them to correlate their otherwise-independent activity against their will?
Best I can find
$ 132,466.01 Africa
$ 4,902,373.13 Asia
$ 49,423,340.29 Europe
$106,546,895.77 N.America
$ 2,509,299.46 Other
$ 6,082,217.76 Oceania
$ 944,844.22 S.AmericaConvert that to GBP and you get about £7.5 million.
Figure that the UK accounts for about 15% of the European economy and assume it contributes to Wikipedia at about an equal share.
That's about £1.125 million in estimated annual recurring contributions from the UK.
You said 10-100/mo, so let's assume £55/mo or £660/year as the mean.
That would be about 1,700 Brits, a surprising number.
I don't even know what laws apply to the Middle East, Africa, or South America, but I'm sure there are enough of them to make most sites culpable in some way.
I think the Greens are opposed to it, and maybe Reform in one of their populist speeches, but the majority of UK representatives seem to support this law.
Based on this poll, most Britons also support the OSA: https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/britons-back-online-safety-acts-...
Cloudflare just offers a button with fewer false positives than naive GeoIP databases. They're not so much gatekeepers as they are the security guards hired by the stores themselves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising_statisti...
Then the bill payer can enable or disable access for three categories
* Under 18s
* Over 18s
* Unknown
as they are the bill payer and entering into a credit agreement requires you to be over 18. If you wanted belt and braces the phone companies doing PAYG could set it to disabled unless you authenticate your age to avoid the "buy simcard for cash" loophole.
ISPs could choose to implement finer grained controls in their routers. The majority of the big ISPs would likely block the "over 18" category by default.
To caveate this, I am a Labour member (with the goal of advising tech policy such that they don't send our tech industry off a sharp cliff). I've spoken to a few in the cabinet now about growth and industrial policy, and there's no appetite for engagement outside of their think-tanks. I go to the conferences today, and in contrast to the Tory government days where the main topic of conversation was "what do people want" and "how do we gain seats in the election", it's now all navel-gazing about how "well" their policies poll (vs how well the party does, as if they're the same thing). It's baffling how out of touch the current power brokers are regarding the danger Labour are in. There's rose-tinted glasses, and then there's obsidian-tinted horse blinders.
Only my very first rental back in January 2005 wasn't required, however I would say either it wasn't as widespread, or I was very lucky getting the flat from a university student leaving the apartment and her father (the landlord) fancying me.
Most of folks on my friends circle have similar experiences.
It's an interesting idea. I presume that the there would be similar laws to selling guns. So there would need to be the national ID card and checks when selling any internet-enabled device. TVs, phones, cameras etc.
I as, a parent would probably need a phone safe, into which I could place my phone when I wasn't using it (though I suppose conceal-carry would be permissible). I;d probably want to have biometric locks on my TV, Chromecast etc etc and the children wouldn't be able to use the TV unsupervised unless all smart functions were locked down.
Doesn't sound particularly cool.
It’s what the UK government has shown time and again when they ask for more data: they use it for previously denied-aims to expand their surveillance state.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_mass_surveillance...
>The ICO also confirmed that companies could not avoid accountability by withdrawing their services in the UK.
Wonder if it could also apply to American news sites (and Japan's 5ch/2channel, I was told they engage in this as well).
Some parents are awful at parenting, so much so it makes me question why they had kids if they clearly don't care about bringing them up properly.
It's a no brainer that kids should have minimal screen exposure. There's even organisations which specifically state the most ideal screen time (basically none up to 18 months, 1 hour max up to 5 years old). iPad children will be a detriment to the future of any country.
The screen time is bad enough, without the sloppy content you can very easily find online. The best ways to destroy a kid are to saddle them with social media, media consumption and porn/gambling/vices at an early age. Their brain is being fried during development.
Phones can have passcodes, fingerprint readers, facial recognition (for parents face) to keep kids off them.
Devices can have multiple user accounts, each with different purposes and applications. On my linux laptop, I have two accounts, one for work & one for personal, with distinct applications and configuration.
If all else fail, each manufacturer can product a simple device that can only chat & call with parents in case of emergencies. Can be a simple smart watch or pager like design, or just a dumb phone.
We are at the point where children should not even be exposed to the news (which is primarily incendiary politics these days) unless it is a major event. Smart TV's has so much garbage on them, why should they be allowed to even watch what they want on it?
Either way, ALL of these requires the parents to actually be parents. We can create the perfect technological solution but if the parents expose the child to porn/drugs/social media etc etc and fry their brains, it is a parental problem and not a tech problem.
wait... wut? Gun ownership for 12yo's? wtf :D
Though the idea of "internet only for adults" is not that bad IMHO. Yes, internet is (well, at least was advertised as) infinite-resource-of-knowledge but we know how it turned out - IMHO minority of underage use it to spend hours reading wikipedia and instead spend hours glued to crap like tiktok (though crap like that should be banned altogether as well :D)
It's not an unreasonable assumption either. Nick Clegg did seemingly get rewarded for tanking the lib Dems. The ones lower in the party hierarchy will also have seen plenty of examples of pyrrhic loyalty being rewarded.
What modern parties effectively teach - UK Labour is just one of many examples, not even the only example in the UK - is that the supreme political virtue is loyalty to decisions taken in rooms you weren't invited to. That, they think, will eventually get them invited to those rooms.
The sad thing is that whether the rooms actually exist or not, the result is much the same.
"Don't obey in advance" is Tim Snyder's first rule against tyranny. While that is a great moral rule to follow in tyrannies, all organizations want people to obey beforehand, whether tyrannies or not. It's called showing initiative, doing what's needed without having to be told explicitly, and no organisation can function without it.
But in organizations with opaque power structures, where it's expected that decisions are taken unaccountably ("Noen har snakket sammen", loosely, "There has been discussion", used to be an ironic phrase in the Norwegian Labour Party), people may easily slip into obeying in advance a tyrant who doesn't even exist. They're trying to please the responsible people who are surely in charge somewhere nebulously above them in the hierarchy, but those people don't exist, it's bullshitters like Starmer all the way to the top.
Snyder's had his first rule, but I have a first rule too, which I keep repeating, and that is that powerful people believe in all the stupid things regular people believe in. They just act differently on the beliefs. A common person who thinks covid was an ethnically targeted bioweapon rants about it online and gets banned from Reddit. A powerful person who believes it, thinks "it's important that we too get such a weapon, and don't trust experts who say it can't be done, they probably just have scruples". A common person who thinks a Jewish cabal rules the world maybe pesters his relatives with it all day. A powerful person who believes it - well, he's more likely to do something like what Starmer has been doing the last decade. You don't try to fight Bilderberg, obviously, you try to get invited to it. Once you do, (like e.g Jens Stoltenberg was) you probably get disappointed and try to figure out who the real competent ones behind them too are, and how to join them - but you're not terribly disappointed, because on the way up you've been rewarded by all the others who thought they'd be rewarded for supporting someone like you.
One of my colleagues had Child Services round, as their daughter had told her school he was abusing her, because he confiscated her mobile (that he was paying for).
Good luck "parenting" any child in this day and age, when any seemingly minor things you think you can do as a parent, lead to that sort of outcome.
How'd you keep a kid off the internet, when they're happy to say anything to the authorities get that internet access back?
but why we have laws at all? if the US business can do whatever the F they want in UK why not in US too?
My kids have learned a huge amount from the internet. I have guided them, discussed what are credible resources, the harms possible etc, who they talk to and what they tell them....
There are solutions that would make it easier for parents - people need tools to manage this. Require that children use child safe SIM cards in their phones (they are available already - EE advertisers them). Home internet connections should be by filtered by default that can then be turned off (or off for particular devices in the ISP supplied router that most people have).
The people writing these laws don't know about DNS.
This isn't really relevant because what is considered "suitable for under 18s" varies wildly per country. Some countries ban rainbow flags, others will happily sell alcohol to 16-year-olds. Plus, 99.99% of websites don't care about this and will be blocked by default if you block the "unknown" category. Grandma isn't going to call their ISP and ask to unblock pornography because the American knitting forum she's on doesn't know how to add TXT records.
Technical solutions don't solve political problems.
> The majority of the big ISPs would likely block the "over 18" category by default.
Existing UK legislation already requires them to do that.
[1] - https://www.rtalabel.org/index.php?content=howtofaq#single
Of course, Ireland will have to move out the way. (Wait, is this an actual metaphor for Brexit?)
For governmental services, I use it for things like logging into health care services. Where I've used it for checking my prescriptions, and communicating with my doctor. If I had kids I would have used it for contact with the school. An other governmental use is tax filling and tax returns which comes around every year, and this is just scratching the surface.
When it comes to non governmental usage, it is mostly bank and bank adjacent usage. I do use it to log into my different banks, my stock broker, and insurance providers.
The solution we have in Norway, is not perfect and one of the persistent problems, are that not everyone can get one, and since it is used a lot by the government, not having it, makes you a bit of a second class citizen. I do believe that they are finally doing something about that, and that the system will be redone a bit next year, so even if the banks don't like you. You will be able to get one.
Who do you want your kids to communicate with over the internet ?
Simpler take: The middle ground has been hollowed out. The old method (appeal to the centre) does not appear to be working. Starmer's throwing stunt policies at the wall to try to get some purchase.
You and the provider may have different ideas about where that line is drawn.
I’m consistently shocked at how authoritarian and draconian HN comments can be. Throwing parents in prison if their 12 year old uses the internet? Jail them and send their kids to foster care? This is your plan for improving the lives of children?
I’m surprised by all of the comments assuming the internet can’t possibly have any value for kids in any way, shape, or form. Did HN commenters grow up and forget what it’s like to be a kid with friends? With an interest in games or technology or discovery?
12 year olds are not buying their own iPhones and monthly service plans contracts.
Creating a national ID system for this is a weird suggestion that would have no impact on kids whatsoever but would create another centralized database for adults and make basic purchases more difficult and prone to tracking. Why even suggest this?
You can tell who doesn’t have kids by the way they extrapolate from the most extreme anecdotes they’ve heard anywhere.
As a parent, I guarantee you that children calling CPS for having rules imposed is not a common occurrence. You can’t really believe that any household with children is getting visited by CPS whenever they ground their kids.
I am a parent of 2 young kids. Its supremely easier for me to just fuck off, give them screens, any screens and do my own thing, rather than get up and just fucking spend time with them, no screens just physical fun and games. Add mental dimensions to the games as much as you want, but they need to be manual, analog, electricity can be max in form of some physical buttons.
There are 2 types of parents among my peers - those who at least try to be a good parent, most of the time. Literally everybody knows how screens or junk food are damaging, there is no escaping to ignorance of this simple fact. The other type, they are a failure themselves - often obese themselves, empty shallow life without proper healthy passions, glued to their own phones all the time, evenings spent mainly in front of TVs. The type, when they die (and have the time to reflect before) are full of regrets and hate.
Without major exception, kids reflect very well into which category their parents fall into. My best childhood friend falls firmly into second category - whole family is obese (while he was multiple times a wrestling national gold medalist in his late teens and ripped). He is a heavy smoker, both cigarettes and pot, quiet mild alcoholic by his own admission (his wife too given how she gulps whole bottles of wine), no hobbies apart from gardening, no passions, just displays everywhere. Unsurprisingly, their kids are the same, just glued to screens, overweight. They never stood the chance, its always a sad experience to visit them.
All this while he thinks how good their live is compared to many people around them. Subconsciousness desperately ironing reality so they feel better about their lives, despite seeing facts every day from all directions how that ain't true. It keeps breaking my heart every time.
The prime responsibility of a parent towards their child is to do their utmost to raise a happy, well balanced individual who knows what they want in their lives and once adult (or even before) will just get up and go for it, whatever it is. I would personally add a pinch of self-discipline to make it all more probable, also a rare sight these days. Now how many parents around you are like this.
Is nobody thinking about what this actually means? Do you really want the entire internet to require ID validation every time you use it? Do you want your government deciding if your content is okay to view, or okay to post? Do you welcome the level of tracking of privacy violations that inherently come with this much government intervention?
It seems people on HN have a sudden wake up call whenever these rules get too close to reality, like when access to websites gets cut off or ID verification is added to websites that they use. My theory is that they’re imagining a world where only the services they dislike get regulated: The TikToks and Facebooks of the internet. None of these people calling for extensive regulation are thinking that sites they use would ever end up on the regulated sites list, but if you enjoy any site with user submitted content (Hacker News included) then you’re calling for additional regulation and tracking of yourself when you demand these things.
It certainly is. And he'd maybe use more classy words for it, if he ever could be convinced to talk about his sincere beliefs. But as I said, I'm fully convinced that powerful people believe all the out there things that regular people believe. We've seen so many examples of it over the decades, and it's otherwise very hard to explain why Starmer would keep doing things which are neither a popular thing to do or the right thing to do.
The simpler take you propose doesn't work for me, because "throwing things at the wall" suggest unpredictability to me, and Starmer has been very predictable if you assume what I have been assuming for a few years now. His actions are not the actions of someone who would try anything, quite the opposite.
this isn't to say that Keir Starmer is doing an amazing job. he's not. he's far too comfortable with authoritarianism and far too establishmentarian, and I would much rather someone like Andy Burnham in charge--even if you can trust his policy positions just as much as Starmer's from when he won the leadership--just because he has some energy and charisma about him, and you feel like he might be able to counteract Farage somewhat, but, at the same time, the level of scrutiny of Labour is incredibly unfair and before you criticise them yourself, you have to try and remember that you're viewing it all through that filter
And doesn't address many of the other problems (eg accuracy)
I think it’s bad for society to treat adults as children, I’m happy that it should be made obviously available (there’s some merit to the argument that tech-illiterate parents often don’t know devices they give their kids have parental controls at all), but not on by default.
When the action is clearly going to hurt their political career, and there's no indication that it will put money in their pockets, and they don't even make much of an attempt to claim they're fighting for a principle, yet they clearly have a purpose in mind and keep doubling-down on it, you have to start looking for a motive somewhere else. "They hate their own people" comes to mind, but that's not really an answer because it still leaves you looking for the reason why they hate their own people. Not all leaders do, after all.
The wallet uses Digital Verification Services (DVS) to poll APIs in front of the data the government already holds on you. These services check details you enter against that data and return cryptographic signatures for each. The wallet puts these together as IDs in a bespoke way, depending on what you need to prove. You can have any number of variations of ID and none of them are centralized.
Some of these signed proofs can be disclosed using Zero Knowledge Proofs (a cryptographic means of demonstrating something without demonstrating anything else) which would actually make it harder to 'correlate' you in the way you describe.
Another thing to bear in mind, the ID is backed up by the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 which reinforces data protection laws and actually wards against the use you describe.
There's a lot of misinformation flying around about this proposal, but the design itself doesn't match the negative characterizations. It's surprisingly good and weighted to the citizen.
This is already the case in UK, has been for years. The bill payer needs to prove age with an ID to lift IP level blocks from some default age blocklist.
It doesn't work well because obviously a lot of internet is shared amongst a household, and the blocklist is too broad to make it annoying enough that any adults will remove it. Then of course you can always just use a VPN same as with the current situation.
There are also the various territories of larger countries that aren't - French Guaiana in South America, Canary Islands are off the coast of Africa.
Or they just focused on getting into government with very little plan about what to do when there, and with a particularly inexperienced team (few former cabinet ministers in the elected Labour MPs).
Sites with user generated content already have to have some level of moderation to remove copyrighted or illegal materials (e.g. child porn). So it's not a big difference to say if you want to have user generated content and not be considered an adult site, you need to take down any submitted adult content (or only allow it in adult verified areas or whatever). If HN doesn't allow people to post their amateur smut stories, it could then be unaffected.
Sure, fine - we can agree on the hardcore porn. Maybe we can even agree on exposed female nipples?
What about sex education material? What about any content that includes an LGBT person? Because if you think I'm being hyperbolic, read page five of Project 2025.
It's also easy for almost everyone to avoid worrying about the lines by just... not trying to exist right along them. If your photography discussion site just has a "no nudity" rule (or blanket puts nudity into its own adult-only section), then you don't have to worry about whether your photo is tasteful art or porn. These are normal rules anyway because sometimes people want to look at their hobby sites in public or at work and just see bird photos or whatever and not have passersby think they're a gooner, or see a surprise decapitation, etc. Even 4chan moderates their hobby boards and separates which ones allow adult material.
I'm a parent, and it's hard, but 0% of it is hard because of the government meddling in my parenting.
That ship sailed at least a decade ago.
From small instances like your employer blocking certain web sites (Google Translate, seriously?) to China's Great Firewall to nations restricting access in certain regions (India, many others), to nations restricting access to certain web sites (Turkey, many many others), to entire countries taking themselves entirely offline (Afghanistan, most recently).
That's a password manager or authenticator app. You don't need a government to do anything to have that.
> Some of these signed proofs can be disclosed using Zero Knowledge Proofs (a cryptographic means of demonstrating something without demonstrating anything else) which would actually make it harder to 'correlate' you in the way you describe.
People always bring this up as a theory, but most of the ZK systems don't actually do this, e.g. they give you a bitstring that "doesn't identify you" but they know who you are when they give it to you, and you're meant to present it to a third party who could collude with the service who does know who you are to map it back to you.
In other words, the ZK proof is an attempt to bamboozle people with complicated math rather than something that really works.
The only way to actually prevent this is to make the data the user presents to the second service indistinguishable for all users meeting the qualification, i.e. if you're over 18 then you get a secret, everyone over 18 gets the same secret, and then the second service just gets the secret and compares it, and you rotate it with some interval which is at least a week. (You can't rotate it continuously or you get timing attacks; even once a week is giving up a non-trivial amount of entropy because you can narrow down the user to the people who have requested the token in the last week and repeat the process every week that person uses it to keep winnowing it down.)
But the proposals don't ever seem to do that, most of them don't even use ZK proofs or don't use them properly.
> Another thing to bear in mind, the ID is backed up by the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 which reinforces data protection laws and actually wards against the use you describe.
You can't fix this by making it illegal because you don't have a mechanism to identify when they're doing it. You give them data that could identify you and then whether they use it for that happens behind closed doors.
Then you get all of the chilling effects even if they're not (currently) doing it because with no way for people to corroborate, people have to assume that they are. And on top of that, you've now deployed a system that ties everyone's activity to their identity and then it's just the stroke of a pen before they're doing it openly, or it comes out that they're doing it illegally but nobody does anything to stop it a la Snowden.
If party A and B are interacting in jurisdictions A and B, which party has to abide by which jurisdiction's laws?
Is the consumer moving into the producer's jurisdiction or is the producer moving into the consumer's jurisdiction?
Laws tend to apply more to the business than the consumer around the world and it's probably fair that this remains to be true, but really it is a hard problem when to parties separated by a border are just sending messages back and forth and you're trying to figure out who has to follow which laws.
These aren't equivalent though. I can flash my ID to someone to buy cigarettes at my gas station and reasonably believe that no third party is storing my ID. The clerk looks at it (or scans it? I have actually never purchased anything requiring an ID before), and I go about my merry way.
If I go online to consume adult content, I definitely do not want my identity to be associated with my proclivities, and I certainly don't trust any third party to handle my ID with the sensitivity it ought to have.
Specifically, our system [1] is available as open source [2] and work is underway to implement it in the EU age verification app [3]. I understand that this thread is about the UK and not the EU, and I make no claims about the UK. The system is not theory, but it is already shipping in Google Wallet [4] and in the Open Wallet Foundation multipaz system [5].
[1] https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/2010
[2] https://github.com/google/longfellow-zk
[3] https://ageverification.dev/av-doc-technical-specification/d...
[4] https://blog.google/products/google-pay/google-wallet-age-id...
If they cared about the country - they don't, they have complete contempt for the public - they would step down, dissolve the party and those in the party with a remaining qubit of morality put their efforts into atoning for their sins and crimes against freedom by working to get a Green/YP/LibDem coalition elected.
Every day they lolligag with this dead party is another vote for Reform - they know this.
Putting the onus on the ISPs operating in the UK rather than the sites operating globally is much easier to implement than trying to enforce your laws on foreign companies.
That's if you want the outcome to block a certain list of sites by default.
As you say in reality we already have that. The question thus is what's the real point of the move, because it's not to stop 15 year olds jacking off.
The part about only listening to their own think tanks is weird. Academia leans left. American conservatives are suspicious of advice not from their think-tanks, but that’s because it’s hostile territory. The Democrats treat the university/expert/consultant class as free labor.
I don’t mean to be critical of your country especially given who is running America. But we do watch, and it has an impact here. Fear of an American Corbyn is one reason Democrats aren’t veering left.
Also I don’t know if this is related, but the fact that the US is about to install Tony Blair to head Gaza should make you rethink Labour’s capacity for thought.
As bad as it is to treat adults as children, it is equally (or worse) to treat children as adults.
Parental control only get you so far. Even if we conjure the perfect tech system to manage this, remember that children were being exploited long before the internet. Bending the internet will not solve the problem, just alleviate the current flavour of child abuse, and force it back offline.
Oh, and a good chunk of abuse happens by friends & family, not strangers.
All cause the parent thought it was "cute" that their daughter/son has an instagram/snapchat/etc account. I think parents deep down knows what is going on but cannot face that reality. Or the parents live vicariously through them, trying to relive that self-discovery process as they monitor the devices.
Too reductive. Password managers and authenticators don't give you any means of passing your official data in an authoritative way.
> The only way to actually prevent this is to make the data the user presents to the second service indistinguishable for all users meeting the qualification
Where ZKPs are used (eg for proof of age over 18) you're describing exactly what the proposal seems to expect.
> You can't fix this by making it illegal because you don't have a mechanism to identify when they're doing it. You give them data that could identify you and then whether they use it for that happens behind closed doors.
The system provides for an auditing service to ensure this doesn't happen without user consent.
Before that, porn was printed on paper magazines and, not surprisingly, sought out by and distributed among curious teenagers.
One thing I have to ask about the democrats and a fear of Corbynism is shutting down primaries really and effective way to prevent one? Voters aren't stupid and the not being able to freely choose their candidate since Obama isn't going to help.
That may be true, but it doesn't seem to prevent stuff like this from happening.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/06/hack-age-verification-...
The desire to pass "official data" from someone outside of the entity you're directly interacting with is the design flaw. Stop having that.
> Where ZKPs are used (eg for proof of age over 18) you're describing exactly what the proposal seems to expect.
I suspect that it isn't, because the only systems that actually work in terms of privacy correspondingly can't provide you with any way to identify someone if they're anonymously providing proof of age to anyone who asks, and then it would only take one person to set up a service to do that for everyone. Whereas if you can catch someone who does that you've just proven that the privacy protections aren't real.
> The system provides for an auditing service to ensure this doesn't happen without user consent.
You're suggesting that someone is going to audit something that happens inside of every private company. That's either going to be a box-checking exercise with zero effectiveness or a massively expensive ordeal that only compounds the problem by expanding access to include a set of government auditors -- or both.
The only way three people can keep a secret is if two of them are dead. If you don't want corporations to have your private information, you can't give it to them and then try to stuff the cat back into the bag. You have to prevent them from having it to begin with.
Laws requiring them to collect it are the opposite of that.
As your closest neighbor I think about how things could have been.