Kids will simply find a way to circumvent it without any extra steps. To make age verification useful for protecting kids, you'd need to lock down every software on every operating system and put it under tight government control. We're talking about things like every programming language with a networking library, wget, curl, every web browser that was ever developed, etc.
All kinds of tools and software would need to be locked down or criminalized. Otherwise, some smart kid is guaranteed to get around the restriction and give that method to others, and if it's at school on a USB stick.
> Kids will simply find a way to circumvent it without any extra steps.
This is just an argument against any regulation whatsoever. Yes, some people will find ways to do illegal stuff, but that doesn't mean forbidding stuff is useless. For instance gangs members always find a way to get access to weapons even in countries where firearms is regulated, but there are still pretty much zero mass slaughter in schools in these countries.
> To make age verification useful for protecting kids, you'd need to lock down every software on every operating system and put it under tight government control.
No! This should never be implemented at the software or OS level in the first place. You should be handed a chip card that you can use for that purpose, like how the bank rent you a credit card. Any other implementation is a bad one, and should be fought.
But by fighting the very idea of age verification instead, an idea that pretty much nobody else in the society has issues with when it comes to voting rights, driving rights, or alcohol consumption, you are just favoring these poor implementations by moving the debate on a ground you can't win.
> Otherwise, some smart kid is guaranteed to get around the restriction and give that method to others,
You should really read that “The optimal amount of fraud is non zero” blog post I linked above.
Sorry, I don't want to involve the government in anything when I just want to communicate. It is a pretty simple request and it is not comparable to anything that can endanger others directly.
You don't need government ID to talk to people and share info. You don't need government ID to take a dump.
Also the criticism of the article is just ignored while it is a very likely development and lack of imagination isn't an excuse.
Even today government in the EU are already implementing mass surveillance, even by third parties.
Verification wasn't needed in the past, it won't be needed in the future.
Requiring an internet ID is the the opinion of a marginalised minority that has difficulties with technology. Aside from those that are advertisers of course.
You spoke yourself and the status quo.
Parents are speaking for their kids in a group and against the status quo. The status quo is not working for them.
“Parents” are not a monolith. Your group will lose this war. Any temporary wins will be worked around and kids will probably lead the charge.
My “group” is not what you think it is.
I have been beating on this drum to avoid this situation for far longer than it has been the topic of interest on HN for the past few months.
We are here, because difficult conversations were avoided and action which could be taken to stop this from metastizing came in the way of growth.
The “parents” win just by having the laws passed, because it makes it clear what guard rails society expects to have in place for internet use.
If you want, I could give you stories of how KYC rules are not followed in India, enabling fraud. How certain rules in the DSA are toothless, resulting in reduced compliance.
Privacy is going to lose. Correction, it is losing, because the people who think they are defending it don’t understand that the forces at play have changed.
Privacy as we wanted, anonymity on the clearnet, is losing, I agree. The next generation of privacy, taking your shit offline, is winning. The step beyond, fully private networks, is in its infancy, but we’ll get there.
Nope, that isn't true. Petitions and opinion polls break records with rejecting such proposals.
First of all, the sane chip card design will not take place. That's virtually guaranteed. As a closely related example, banks all over the world have moved away from this design to merely trust the (nonexistent) security of mobile phones. Why? Costs and convenience.
Second, if you hand over a chip card, you still need to lock down and tightly control every executable on every machine. How else would you guarantee that kids cannot access content the government deems unsuitable for them?
Third, I still haven't seen a coherent argument why parents shouldn't be in charge of what content their children are allowed to consume. I'm not at all against governments providing free parental control software, for example, or voluntary industry standards similar to the movie ratings.
Finally, "protecting the children" is obviously a pretense. The sole purpose of the push for this is for governments to get the foot in the door of operating systems they currently can't control well. It's the starting point for a surveillance infrastructure: age verification -> digital ID verification -> tracking who said what and handing the data over to intelligence and law enforcement.
> First of all, the sane chip card design will not take place. That's virtually guaranteed. As a closely related example, banks all over the world have moved away from this design to merely trust the (nonexistent) security of mobile phones. Why? Costs and convenience.
Businesses are always going to favor the cheapest options, but that's why regulation exist.
> Second, if you hand over a chip card, you still need to lock down and tightly control every executable on every machine. How else would you guarantee that kids cannot access content the government deems unsuitable for them?
You don't need to guarantee that. It's like saying you can't have an alcohol consumption ban on teenagers without spying on them all the time. It's technically true but it doesn't matter: having teenagers consume way less booze due to the rules than they would without it, and that's fine for most people, societies don't need to enforce an absolute 100% ban of things for bans to deliver the expected outcome.
> Third, I still haven't seen a coherent argument why parents shouldn't be in charge of what content their children are allowed to consume.
It's much less about what their children are allowed to consume, but what are businesses allowed to sell to their children. It's exactly like alcohol restrictions: the government don't raid houses to check if parents are letting child drink whine and beer at home, but it aggressively enforces that bars don't sell booze to teenagers.
> Finally, "protecting the children" is obviously a pretense.
Not from the electors. Most people are favorable to these things, and that's why these laws are voted. Obviously intelligence agencies are always trying to get access to more data whenever they can, but that's not the reason why these laws are voted, and the representatives routinely could vote for a version of that which doesn't serve any intelligence purpose.
The world you describe is not plausible from a technical perspective. Any kid who wants to will be able to download a tool that will enable them to surf the net like an adult. It will be as common as our access to cracked C64 games during the 1980s. The only thing to limit this in any reasonable sense is to crack down hard on all operating systems and network software.
At the very least, you will need to make sure that no child can install Linux. Otherwise, why wouldn't they? Most kids aren't stupid and want to know what their braindead parents are doing on the internet.
I really believe it's dangerously naive to believe this is about the children. It's quite obvious why suddenly ominous entities are shilling for age verification, digital IDs, digital wallets, and so on (more is to come). Countries in the EU used to get valuable SIGINT from the US that prevented many serious crimes. They still get it but now they've realized that the US might not always remain aligned with them and panic because they have almost no access to modern operating systems except for buying 0-day exploits on shady black markets. They desperately need to get their foot in the door to get the right surveillance infrastructure going. At the same time, politicians are rightly worried about the influence of bots on elections.
These are the principal reason why governments are suddenly pushing for this. If this was about the children, they'd have done it 30 years earlier. Until very recently, this discussion didn't even exist. It's manufactured.
> Any kid who wants to will be able to download a tool that will enable them to surf the net like an adult. It will be as common as our access to cracked C64 games during the 1980s. The only thing to limit this in any reasonable sense is to crack down hard on all operating systems and network software.
Not if they use a credit-card-like ID that embed a side-channel-resistant cryptographic chip like your credit card does. Your average teenager can't crack a credit card no matter how hard they try.
> I really believe it's dangerously naive to believe this is about the children. It's quite obvious why suddenly ominous entities are shilling for age verification, digital IDs, digital wallets, and so on (more is to come). Countries in the EU used to get valuable SIGINT from the US that prevented many serious crimes. They still get it but now they've realized that the US might not always remain aligned with them and panic because they have almost no access to modern operating systems except for buying 0-day exploits on shady black markets. They desperately need to get their foot in the door to get the right surveillance infrastructure going. At the same time, politicians are rightly worried about the influence of bots on elections.
I'm very disappointed to read this kind of tinfoil hat conspiracy theory here on HN.
The same people want to require licensing before you can publish software, if you look deep enough in these threads.
That's already the case on iOS, Android and even macOS and Windows if you don't want your users to see scary warnings. Of course like many instancing this licensing boils down to paying some company.
But that’s not (yet) a government license. I’ve seen people unironically advocating for a full professional licensing regime with required exams, fees, insurance requirements, and the like.