xinayder

We don't need age attestation or any kind of identity attestation, period.

> Proper ZK proofs don’t work that way. N different proofs will not be linked to each other

in theory. How do you do that on paper? How do you "anonymize" this data, to make it so they aren't related to each other?

This is just like Facebook implementing the Signal protocol on WhatsApp. They technically can't access your messages, but they have all the metadata which most of the times will allow someone to infer the content of the conversation.

How about not needing to do age verification?

You also can't know if Google has broken any of the ZKP promises, or in terms of the field, if Google is cheating and uncovered the secret bits you shared.

Except that ZKP for sensitive data is far from being a thing, and also, I don't want the fucking government to have anything to do with what sites I access. Period.

Why the hell do I need to login to my digital wallet to access a fucking website???

The Swiss succeeded in this, maybe we should look at their model and improve.

Let it not be forgotten that when Denmark was president of the Council of EU and tried to push this forward, one of the former colleagues/friends of the justice minister was charged with child abuse in 2025. Just search Henrik Sass Larssen and Peter Humeelgaard.

We should start digging into the lives of those pushing for mandated age verification, chat control, and other privacy killing measures to show the world their true face. The public deserves to know who exactly is pushing for the "privacy law for kids" agenda.

Age verification online shouldn't exist, period.

I wish they provided an alternative to Cloudflare WARP as well.

Even with similar specs you can still get more performance from a PC because Valve is throttling the Machine to keep thermals down.

According to LTT the original price was in the $800 range, but thanks to Sam Altman it increased to what we saw today.

Steam accounts newer than April do not qualify, plus I think you need to have spent at least $5 to qualify for the reservation queue (i.e. not community limited)

How ironic it is that multibillion AI companies are complaining that their models are being distilled (read: used without permission) while the current top players trained their models on stolen data...

I've discussed this in my company, where I've argued that we are losing critical thinking skills for AI.

My friend said being an engineer is not just writing code, but designing and architecting the system. I agree, but we are also moving that to AI. We are offloading the thought process to a LLM, which confirms our biases and tells us what we want to hear.

Essentially, we are also losing the software architecture and design skills because we aren't talking to other engineers/architects/designers who may approach the problen in a complete different way; we are just asking the AI to confirm our thoughts.

> FWIW: People building games contribute something to society, playing them contributes nothing.

if there are no players, there is no money to be made, developers will be fired.

and besides, I'd rather put someone on the street if this is the multibillionaire CEO that exploits his devs, than a dev itself. And companies can, you know, slash their billionaire salaries and bonuses to comply with the law.

> It's definitely not open hostility, but many little things which quickly give you the impression that you are not welcome and seen as a threat.

Literally what most expats go through in Europe. I live abroad for 6 years and here, a Central EU country, this also happens. I am trying to learn the language and even then I got told implicitly several times that I will still be treated as a foreigner, no matter how much culture and language I learn from the local country.

I remember when I watched a presentation from a Google engineer at a summer school for AI tech last year and I asked why Google shipped AI slop when no one wanted it. He tried to gaslight me saying "users like this feature", and I told him to look up every major forum on the web, there is not a single good comment about Gemini being forced on. Then he said it was just an A/B testing and that not everyone had it enabled by default.

I wouldn't be surprised if they made up the statistics to justify the enslopification.

The math doesn't add up. They say they found more than 20k vulnerabilities, then it decreases to 1700 high or critical, then this number becomes 175 (when Claude didn't reassess the CVE severity) and over 500 later on. Then they say they confirmed 800 vulnerabilities... what happened to the 20k figure?

Plus, they also mention they check if fixes are available for the bugs they found. What are the chances they are re-reporting old bugs just to inflate their numbers? Bugs that were already fixed?

And how can we be sure their reassessment is not artifically increasing the severity of the CVEs found just to create FUD and sell their product?

Maybe it's time to go back to the time where computers and entertainment were niche and develop efficient resource-constrained devices....

I hate it that we had decades of progress to have computers become a very expensive hobby because some dudes high on fentanyl think some text prediction model that destroys the planet is worth a trillion dollars.

> That sounds worse to be honest. You're essentially asking for the government to be not only aware of but also able to control all digital payments. That upends how money has worked over (literally) millenia, and is an incredible risk to take. Giving someone in government the ability to block someone's payments and trusting they won't abuse it might be fine as long as good people remain in power, but do you really want to bet the entire nation's ability to live life on that?

There are financial laws that banks must comply with and one of them require banks to share information with the Central Bank about potential fraudulent transactions. Having a payment system using the CB's infrastructure doesn't change anything. They are still required to comply to bank secrecy laws and can only investigate your transactions after obtaining a warrant.

I knew something was wrong when they started showing a popup on the web vault asking you to subscribe, every time you open it.

Enshittificstion incoming.

The same thing is happening at my company. We get meetings saying how the market and sales predictions are going well, we're doing so good... yet, budget within organizations inside the company keeps shrinking and we are having massive layoffs year after year.

When sales were bad we didn't have budget cuts. Now that we have stable profit margins, we are cutting costs.

As long as it misidentifies civilians as potential terrorists, for Israel, it's a feature, not a bug.

Can you show me examples where locking down an OS has prevented fraud in banking?

Honestly, if the only way to secure your banking system is by locking down users' devices, there is something really bad going on at your end, security-wise. Your system should be secure even without locking down user hardware.

And exactly how many Linux distros support Secure Boot out of the box? Just a few.

I can perhaps agree that the idea of SB can be good, but it was designed (and is used) in a bad way. Just look at how many distros do not support SB.

Tell me when DMCA law has worked in favor of small companies/developers?

DMCA is abused every. single. time.

DRM is a technology and is inherently evil. Web attestation is DRM for the web, and is inherently evil. Age ID is a technology and is inherently evil.

We have over 30 years of the world wide web and for these more than 3 decades this was never a problem. Suddenly, we "need" to create new technology that seem to be security features, but are essentially just being used for evil, thus being inherently bad.

It's not like these technologies were created for the greater good and misappropriated by bad actors. They were proposed by bad actors in the first place, they cannot not be inherently good.

Those in power who need convincing are the same ones pushing for mass surveillance online.

> Are there open and privacy-preserving standards that can solve the problem of bots and minors? If not, what would be required to establish one, and is it realistic?

Ideally there shouldn't be standards for this. What we have already is enough.

Companies claiming they are closing down their services/devices to protect the users is total BS. Facebook has admitted they get 10% of their ad revenue from scams, and that's the reason they won't go after scammers on their platforms.

Same can be said for Google. They could come up with numerous ways to block bots or make captchas harder for actual bots (while also not flagging every non-Chrome user as a potential bot, like they do nowadays), but they pretend this is an unsolvable problem that requires a nuclear solution, it used to be Web DRM but now it's called Fraud Defense.

If you use Turnstile you can skip all the Cloudflare captchas.