alt Hacker NewsStop Killing the Internet: No Digital ID and No Age Verification
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I want the right to not be identified. I also want the right to SELF identify. I think the toxic culture of the internet has happened in part because anonymity leads to lack of accountability. I want to self identify and interact with other people who also self identify. The cost of running LLM botnets is going down. I cannot imagine how the next cycle of elections is going to be like on all countries. I understand the right to remain anonymous, that should remain, but that state should not be the default on these massively big platforms. Our brains and political systems are not designed for this. And no, "get people to get rid of their smartphone voluntarily" like I see on the comments is not going to happen.
There is a surprising amount of engineers who don’t understand what’s happening. So they deal with it as if it’s a funny thing… yeah if two police officers come knocking your door with hard data, you will just explain… and yeah, I mean kids, can bypass it… right? Wrong. This is not 1995. They can make very harsh laws and they can make it borderline impossible to bypass should some authority choose to do so.
The danger here is control: total and absolute control of who will be able to see what, at any given time. Once upon a time this was a hard problem, not anymore.
Things are far more enjoyable as a teen when it s forbidden, remember the golden age of p2p!
Teens who want to see porn will be able to see porns, but they will learn somethings along the way to do so
This is caricatural of course, but it s just so dumb as law as enforcing age verification "anonymously" is just like a don quichotte battle at AI era
I'm glad they mention privacy preserving and being voluntary. It's possible to make digital ID that allows selectively revealing attributes without identity, and that could solve problems like bots, socketpuppets, etc along with reasonable age-gating. It could be an ideal internet if it's properly applied. The problem is it's difficult to verify all the promises are being kept, and if they're not it instantly becomes a true dystopia. And sites could use it in inappropriate ways resulting in discrimination.
So if i can not circumvent the surveilance- can i pack my wanted unsurveiled stuff into harmless data and send them- basically use the surveiled Internet as a UDP layer - over which my hidden unsurveiled internet goes via TCP?
am i alone in wanting the internet to be killed? we’d all be better off if everyone wasn’t terminally online
The name could also be:
"Stop overcontrolling and overregulating every aspect of our lives!"
>The legislation should require anonymous or pseudonymous proof-of-age
NO. It really shouldn't. I will not comply. Porn sites can require this shit, but not the rest of the internet. Social media, dating websites, that's up to the users. If kids are on there, that's on the parents. Do your job, be the parent. I'm not going to let lazy good for nothing parents ruin the internet for everyone else.
So if i understand correctly, there's no webpage to sign this initiative yet?
The internet's (at least as we knew it) days were numbered as soon as the dot com bubble happened. It changed from a thing to share info to a thing to make money. It's irrecoverably corrupted and this blatant overreach for everyone's PII is just a symptom.
Stop letting regular people know they are engaging with bots
Only massive data gatherers should be able to track and know everything about people
How are we on the tech and protocols side of having a truly distributed worldwide mesh-net?
i.e. drone swarms replacing ISPs?
I think it's a missed opportunity to not have called it "Stop spying on every EU citizen online". It would make for great headlines and might finally wake people up when they see that the EU has rejected a proposal called that.
"Stop killing the internet" unfortunately means nothing at all to the layman, they will still be using it pretty much exactly as they were before, and governments will just claim "See, internet is still working".
The Internet is already dead.
I'm reasonably confident that in the relatively near future, the Internet will be so overrun with bots and other worthless "content" that people will flock to platforms that confirm IRL identity.
I think if it we want to stop killing the internet, the lack of regulation of AI/bot companies is the biggest problem right now.
I haven't considered this before with SKG, but if this progresses, it means the EU parliament may choose to take action based on an initiative that potentially only a vocal minority supports [0], while coming across as if they were simply following the will of the people.
Not sure how I feel about that, sounds kind of problematic in retrospect. Especially since there's no mechanism for triggering EU-wide referendums to help this AFAIK.
[0] population of the EU: 452 million, unique signatures required for this: 1 million
We can talk, talk, and governments will still move forward. Or we can build an alternative that shows it's possible to get age verification while maintaining privacy.
There is a real way out of it -- the governments can have their cake and eat it too. I published several academic papers to prove it, and I'm open to building and deploying it. Would anyone want to work on this together:
A few things you can legally do online without ID or age verification in the US
1) buy cigars and pipe tobacco (but not cigarettes!)
2) Buy "CBD" by the pound
3) Buy ammunition, a barrel and the rest of gun parts for a glock, except a frame/receiver that can be 3d printed in a few hours to complete it.
4) Order and have delivered wine
But there are people arguing to skip all that and go to straight to ID for social media. It isn't about the children. It's about keeping tabs on who says what.
Even for a "Citizens' Initiative", this stuff is remarkably tone-deaf. "No Digital ID" ignores the very-real need for people to prove their identity to government(-ish) entities online, and to do so in a reliable, cheap and convenient way. Sure, you do not want that ID to become mandatory for publishing or existing on the Internet in general, but that's a separate discussion: demand sufficient protection for anonymous/pseudonymous posts instead, which is absolutely something that needs to be codified as part of basic human rights.
"No age verification" is even deader-on-arrival. Parents are literally screaming at politicians to protect "the children" (as always), but pretty much everything that has been tried so far to silence those screams has failed (remember PICS, the Platform for Internet Content Selection: that was the last serious contender, and it has been dead for, like, 20 years). Again: demand a way to implement this securely and anonymously, don't take an untenable abolitionist stance or resort to hand-waving in the vague general direction of "parental responsibility": that has been tried, and it's not working anymore.
And, please, stop vilifying the EU in these matters. The UK left the EU, ostensibly so they could make "more sensible laws" in, specifically, respects like these, and they're now leading the assault on basic freedoms with even more fervor. And no, that's not just big-bad-Starmer's fault: it's a preview of what you have to argue against and propose a compromise for instead.
As far as I know the only thing that influences change is money. What methods could be implemented to take money away from governments that implement with such things? All of my ideas would be very low traction but there are clever people here on HN that I am sure could come up with a few better ideas.
One of my (probably dumb) ideas is:
- Create a legal presence in a country that does not require being dystopian, relaxed business laws, less regulation, lower taxes, move most of the corporate side of the business there. Take the tax revenue with you. It does not have to be all at once. Make the move a slow boil so they don't see it until it's too late.
Which countries, provinces, regions, states have the least regulation, least dystopian behavior and the least taxes? There has to be a incentive for business leaders and board members to move things around. Bonus if the saved money pays for a Gulfstream G650 ER or two.
UA spies on Europeans, and vice versa. Then they share, it's not spying on your citizens, it's called 'intelligence sharing'.
This is funny coming from the EU who brought us cookie banners.
This initiative has the ID "ECI(2026)000011". If I understand this correctly, that means there have only been eleven citizen initiatives this year? Is that system working as designed, because that's a shockingly low number.
Edit: the initiatives themselves also have shockingly low numbers of signatures. A few thousand. A million are required for the EC to take notice. This system seems a bit shitty. But maybe I'm misunderstanding it.