This seems inevitable in our "safetyism" age, so if stopping it doesn't work, we need to make sure that third-party ID techniques are bullet-proof. Can't something like private-public encryption keys work for this? If the Bitcoin blockchain can keep identities secret, couldn't we design a system modeled on something like that?
There are indeed cryptographic approaches to age assurance, using what's called a "zero-knowledge proof" (see: https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/age-verification-id/#zero-knowledge-proofs for an explanation). The basic idea is to bootstrap up from some government issued ID (e.g., a driver's license) to a digital ID (e.g., a mobile driver's license) and then anonymously use that to prove your age. Apple has started to deploy something like this, but it's not the standard technique.
As an aside, Bitcoin doesn't do a very good job of keeping identities secret; although they're not explicitly stored in the blockchain, there are methods of tracing transactions. See "A Fistful of Bitcoins" by Meiklejohn et al. https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~smeiklejohn/files/imc13.pdf
What the liberals have not realized after decades is that free speech, like all freedoms, becomes unpopular when it becomes a cacophony, and what I see is an extremely extremely flawed attempt for governments around the world to respond to the cacophony in an extremely inelegant, brute-force method that severely compromises the privacy of everyone involved, where the insanity could very much cause people to move away from communication on the Internet.
For many, that is deliberate and is seen as a desired outcome, as the internet once made up of peripheral weirdos such as tech nerds and anime fans have now become the mainstream forum of debate. This is combined with the Internet technology's unique ability to amplify voices, especially extreme voices, easily to millions of people, and establishment leaders start to sense the threat.
Hosting extreme pornography or extremist ideologies was not an issue when there was a layer of plausible deniably around the internet itself- when only a few people knew that the Internet was full of Nazis and pedophiles and no one in power really cared.
Since 2020 especially, the mainstream has been fully thrusted onto the Internet, and this is even after we saw in 2011 in the Arab Spring and 2016 with Brexit and the election of Donald Trump that the Internet could be used to affect politics.
So now that everyone has a nuclear bomb, everyone knows that everyone has a nuclear bomb, and our biological human bodies and fragile wooden houses are too weak to survive a nuclear bomb, people realize that the current ecosystem of extreme freedom has left them weak, and are desperately reaching for the censor to remove the freedom that is trying to kill them, in the same way that a soldier being shot at desperately clings to cover or a deer tries to escape a pack of wolves trying to eat it.
Long term forecast: most countries attempt to put some form of "restrictions" or "ID verification" on social media, some more than others, especially since those social media companies are mostly American/Chinese oligarchs that are both seen as an external neocolonizer and are very likely to bend. The normies either deals with it or moves away from the brainrot mainstream sites (Tiktok, Twitter), an increasing amount for a variety of reasons go offline entirely. The enthusiasts escape to a new ecosystem of underground social media and the Fediverse that is emerging in places like Stoat, Mastodon, Element, hosted in the remaining countries that do not censor social media, in some hole in the laws that are likely to be very porous (such as being exempt from ID verification due to lacking an algorithmic feed), or fully skirt the law knowing the risks like ThePirateBay. Mainstream society turns against the Internet, seeing it as once again the domain of peripheral (though very authentic) weirdos hosting dumb AI-generated cat videos, ultimately create a media environment that, now through social and political rather than technological limitations, is similar to that of the 1990s and 2000s Web 1.0.
Julie in mangrand of the australia e safety commission has april and terrible history of being a bigot, and elevating other bigots, to shareholder positionson the e safety council. Because of nepotism and lying about the contents in games ...
Collective shout is toxic, and they work with the national center on sexual exploitation... and that was called morality and media, and we all know what that was.. in short, it's not about protecting kids.In fact, the group formally known as morality media that I just mentioned, had Ron DeHaas bail out his pedophile stepson. The stepson was 38, the police decoy, he was chatting with pretended to be 14.
How do we stop it?
This seems inevitable in our "safetyism" age, so if stopping it doesn't work, we need to make sure that third-party ID techniques are bullet-proof. Can't something like private-public encryption keys work for this? If the Bitcoin blockchain can keep identities secret, couldn't we design a system modeled on something like that?
There are indeed cryptographic approaches to age assurance, using what's called a "zero-knowledge proof" (see: https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/age-verification-id/#zero-knowledge-proofs for an explanation). The basic idea is to bootstrap up from some government issued ID (e.g., a driver's license) to a digital ID (e.g., a mobile driver's license) and then anonymously use that to prove your age. Apple has started to deploy something like this, but it's not the standard technique.
As an aside, Bitcoin doesn't do a very good job of keeping identities secret; although they're not explicitly stored in the blockchain, there are methods of tracing transactions. See "A Fistful of Bitcoins" by Meiklejohn et al. https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~smeiklejohn/files/imc13.pdf
What the liberals have not realized after decades is that free speech, like all freedoms, becomes unpopular when it becomes a cacophony, and what I see is an extremely extremely flawed attempt for governments around the world to respond to the cacophony in an extremely inelegant, brute-force method that severely compromises the privacy of everyone involved, where the insanity could very much cause people to move away from communication on the Internet.
For many, that is deliberate and is seen as a desired outcome, as the internet once made up of peripheral weirdos such as tech nerds and anime fans have now become the mainstream forum of debate. This is combined with the Internet technology's unique ability to amplify voices, especially extreme voices, easily to millions of people, and establishment leaders start to sense the threat.
Hosting extreme pornography or extremist ideologies was not an issue when there was a layer of plausible deniably around the internet itself- when only a few people knew that the Internet was full of Nazis and pedophiles and no one in power really cared.
Since 2020 especially, the mainstream has been fully thrusted onto the Internet, and this is even after we saw in 2011 in the Arab Spring and 2016 with Brexit and the election of Donald Trump that the Internet could be used to affect politics.
So now that everyone has a nuclear bomb, everyone knows that everyone has a nuclear bomb, and our biological human bodies and fragile wooden houses are too weak to survive a nuclear bomb, people realize that the current ecosystem of extreme freedom has left them weak, and are desperately reaching for the censor to remove the freedom that is trying to kill them, in the same way that a soldier being shot at desperately clings to cover or a deer tries to escape a pack of wolves trying to eat it.
Long term forecast: most countries attempt to put some form of "restrictions" or "ID verification" on social media, some more than others, especially since those social media companies are mostly American/Chinese oligarchs that are both seen as an external neocolonizer and are very likely to bend. The normies either deals with it or moves away from the brainrot mainstream sites (Tiktok, Twitter), an increasing amount for a variety of reasons go offline entirely. The enthusiasts escape to a new ecosystem of underground social media and the Fediverse that is emerging in places like Stoat, Mastodon, Element, hosted in the remaining countries that do not censor social media, in some hole in the laws that are likely to be very porous (such as being exempt from ID verification due to lacking an algorithmic feed), or fully skirt the law knowing the risks like ThePirateBay. Mainstream society turns against the Internet, seeing it as once again the domain of peripheral (though very authentic) weirdos hosting dumb AI-generated cat videos, ultimately create a media environment that, now through social and political rather than technological limitations, is similar to that of the 1990s and 2000s Web 1.0.
All those policies are created with one single goal in mind - to catalogue and enumerate ALL human beings on the planet, not just kids.
People who don't see it have to be either blind or willfully ignorant.
Julie in mangrand of the australia e safety commission has april and terrible history of being a bigot, and elevating other bigots, to shareholder positionson the e safety council. Because of nepotism and lying about the contents in games ...
Collective shout is toxic, and they work with the national center on sexual exploitation... and that was called morality and media, and we all know what that was.. in short, it's not about protecting kids.In fact, the group formally known as morality media that I just mentioned, had Ron DeHaas bail out his pedophile stepson. The stepson was 38, the police decoy, he was chatting with pretended to be 14.
https://endsexualexploitation.org/articles/ncose-statement-on-resignation-of-ron-dehaas/
The worst part is this is that Paxton is suing discord for that breach. The problem was with the vendor. But in his
Injunction, and all the like, he's trying to say that the very age verification system that failed is the same "solution" he wants.