What I’d like to see is for the site’s request to contain their access rules. Must be over 18, must be in country X, etc. Then on-device it checks my ID against that rule set, and simply returns a pass/fail result from those checks. This way the site would know if I’m allowed to be there, but they don’t get any specific or identifiable information about me. Maybe I’m 18, maybe I’m 56… they don’t know, they both simply send a pass. For a simple age check, a user’s exact birthday, name, address, etc are irrelevant, but I bet companies will get greedy and try to pull it anyway.

I see the monkey paw of the ID spec as leading to more companies seeking to get all our data, when they really don’t need it, and have shown they can’t be trusted with it.

I already see this with Apple Pay. When buying a digital item, some companies are awesome and simply take the payment with no other data. Others pull name, address, email, etc to make a payment when none of that is required.

Apple wasn’t there when I was and even broader Google joined about 6 months after I left Google in 2015 (I was just proactive about seeing the standard coming) but the big players hopped on board later in the process.

We were all also acutely aware of the privacy implications and making sure the bodies would sign records of >18, >21 to avoid having to share too much info (pre ZKproofs being more widely accepted recognized).

Don't forget: these are the upstanding members of society who brought the dystopia to you.

The current administration has collected nearly all the pieces of Exodia to be able to legally criminalize homosexuality and transgenderism without ever writing a law that says those exact words and have it be held up as constitutional. I'd say it was clever if it wasn't awful.

With all due respect this comes across as mysoginic and ageist. It is also quite unnecessary to your point. Especially because middle aged women aren't the most powerful lobby in the US by any stretch.

Seriously, isn't this sort of par for the course? We've always regulated what minors can access on the internet. Facebook didnt even formally allow children on their site (I don't know if that's still the case). I think it's a much larger issue that we haven't been enforcing those rules, since we apparently think they are a good idea.

Not to mention that you're almost certainly going to have to tie this stuff to specific accounts that will then forever and ever keep your habits collected. One day somebody enterprising is going to add all that data together too.

In past HN comments this apparently exists IRL in Germany and/or Canada, where age can be proven via a smartphone without leaking one's identity to the verifier and without any communication back to the government.

You're practically forced to have a Google/Apple account and a google/apple smartphone to even exist in today's world.

I only imagine it changing after a significant cultural change in which the economic value is not held as higher than the value of privacy, but would be delighted to be wrong in this regard.

Anti government folk from the USA hated them and decided they were government overreach.

Its nice to have a little space, and to have your own thoughts and opinions, but not at the expense of civilisation.

People should not be able to use privacy to evade responsibility or debts.

We always need to balance freedoms with responsibility.

Final thought is that this is precisely why government and politics is not a joke and needs to be taken seriously. We need small transparent governments we can trust and that are a held accountable.

If you don't trust your government, you've got bigger problems than your privacy.

Congress critters should be opposed to the centralized ID verification systems as their browsing habbits will be exposed to the world when those sites ooopsie dooopsie "leak" the data or just openly sell it or an employee turns that data into a summarized online spreadsheet of who is into what. The kickbacks and lobbying they may be potentially receiving will not be worth it.

[1] - https://www.rtalabel.org/index.php?content=howtofaq#single

[2] - https://www.shodan.io/search?query=RTA-5042-1996-1400-1577-R... [dont follow the links, NSFW]

This is going to impact every book out there, creating an environment where the authors simply can't tell their stories anymore because of someone's moral shock.

Bad things happen in stories to characters, and authors need that flexibility. Its the journey in overcoming these things that makes the story good. The moment you or an author can't express reality without it being a felony, is the moment you no longer have real writers.

Some people don't write for money, and these things impose untenable cost on everyone.

> There should be a clear exemption threshold for low volume indie products, build your own PC, and open source self-install like Linux - since the purpose is to protect ignorant/apathetic consumers.

Then everyone will just follow a YouTube tutorial to reinstall their operating system and bypass restrictions. There were TikTok videos teaching kids how to steal cars, would there not be easy to follow instructions to bypass whatever client side filtering is implemented?

I get where you're coming from, but mandated client side filtering has been tried and has been ridiculed as a complete failure every time. Attempts have been made to market and provide filtering products to parents with little effect, with them either being easy to bypass or difficult to use.

It's actually kind of interesting to see the people who were fighting against client side filtering are now advocating for it, because server side restrictions are the next logical step.

sounds like the solution to me. disallow under 18s from internet access. any parent who allows an underage to browse the internet unsupervised should be penalized to the same degree that they would if they directly provided hardcore pornography to the child, because thats exactly what it is.

I personally would choose this route, handing kids fully internet enabled pornography consumption devices is beyond ridiculous, and the size factor of smartphones (take them everywhere, camera connected directly to encrypted chats with strangers) well the fact that the government even allows this is simply a matter of confusion to my small mind.

What am I missing here? Why do we allow children internet access?

It’s the ambulance chaser section of the article that explains the problem.

American Christians can and should rely on content blockers rather than lawsuits.

This limits the restrictions to those with incredibly broad support. Keeping a lot of agency with families on how to raise their children.

Digital age verification, if implemented well, is easy to enact, and hard to sabotage without being noticed. That enables restrictions that 49% of people disagree with. Heck, it enables restrictions that 49% of Congress disagrees with. That could be 60% of people disagreeing.

The enforcement here is quite twisted: it attracts greedy litigants. Lying is bad, but greed is a mortal sin.

You aren't going to stop teenagers from watching porn if you have the internet.

All this would do is change the websites that teenagers are using.

It strikes me as just political grandstanding since the people putting forth this idea must know it is completely pointless.

Not to mention, a website is vastly different than a physical store.

2+3. A simple cookie with a birth year ought to work. Why should every site worry about South Dakota’s definitions when checking a cookie seems reasonable effort. Circumvention of that is already fraud.

Tough luck, I say. If you’re going to bring humans into this world, you better do a great job at it and not externalize responsibility or create a nuisance for others.

I'm going to have to upload 3D models of my face and pictures of my ID just to use the internet because... some people don't like the idea of other people's kids using the internet?

These were problems from before the age of devices. If anything car oriented development has made it easier to control your children's experience diet by controlling their physical proximity.

Fundamentally I think you just need to trust your kids beyond a certain point. Do your best to build constructive consumption habits with them (including restricting access to devices as needed), help build good moral frameworks, but always remember that the world is messy and it's your child's job to synthesize their upbringing with their experiences. We all did the same while growing up

If these legislators cared about keeping kids safe, they’d be focused on getting them off social media, not stopping adults from exercising free speech.

It really isn’t, and even if it were an ISP could offer it. Indeed I believe most ISPs do (I chose one which is unfiltered, I do my own filtering at a router and dns level, the biggest threat is DoH)

If you are too busy to parent, then you shouldn't be one in the first place.

May be such inept people who don't care that much about their kids as to setup parent control shouldn't have kids in the first place? Why we all should take a hit to our rights/business/etc. just because of such careless and irresponsible parents?

Your kids is your personal responsibility. It the same story again and again - why can't these conservative people own their personal responsibilities without hoisting its costs onto the others?

Even though I could predict what side HN would stand on any sort of internet freedom post, reading through all the reasonable yet greyed-out comments in this thread feels like HN's last dying breath as a place for genuine debate.

Now, I can get behind some censorship if it's for very good reasons. As soon as it's for moralistic reasons, you've lost me. This is a morality law. Morality laws are bad, period. We need real, concrete reasons for blocking content and enforcing censorship - not morality.

Why not? Because morals change from person to person and throughout history. What an evangelical thinks is moral is different from what I think is moral.

If the internet existed during times of slavery, would they have censored websites addressing freedom because it is "immoral"? In my mind, yes. That's a problem with the entire thought process. So, we should throw the thought process out.

I don't know what the future holds in 10 years, 20 years, 30. I don't want to be bound to laws that rely solely on morality. That's just asking for trouble.

I mean, even just the word "pornography" is a moral footgun. Who defines that? Because a large portion of the US believes anything containing homosexuals is automatically pornographic, regardless of the material.

On that note, out of all the examples you could have given for discussion categories that are unbecoming to have with minors, you chose 3 relatively benign ones, lol.

Why is that so bad? As a kid I really appreciated participating in mixed-age discussions on many topics. I view that as part of what it means to grow into a "young adult."

Too often I think we (North American society) assume that school, with all it's rigorous age separation, gives kids the space and instruction they need to do well in the world but inevitably we get 18 year olds with no awareness of how the world functions beyond themselves... because they've only ever dealt with people of the same age.

The world is a diverse place; ideologically, racially, and in age. We, adults, need to be comfortable communicating with both children and legal minors because they'll be future citizens of the world [added in edit:] and they need to learn those skills too.

Overall, we keep trying to model a world that filters it's own interactions towards children, which is flawed to begin with, but at some point people stop being children, and where does that leave them w.r.t. their expectations of others? If you've never had to consider that an adult might act in bad faith because your world has been so sanitized, are you prepared for a world with bad actors in it?

I also don't understand why the government should control who I can talk to in a digital space. Maybe start investigating the president's flight records if you suddenly care about children interacting with adults.

Another way for it all to unfold is maybe 98% of online discourse is useless in a few years. Maybe it's useless today, but we just didn't have the tools to make it obvious by both generating and detecting it. Instead of AI filtering to weed out AI, a more likely outcome is AI filtering to weed out bad humans and our own worst contributions. Filter out incessant retorting from keyboard warriors. Analyze for obviously inconsistent deduction. Treat logical and factual mistakes like typos. Maybe AI takes us to a world where humans give up on the 97% and only 1% that is useless today gets through. The internet's top 2% is a different internet. It is the only internet that will be valuable for training data to identify and replace the 1% and converge onto the spaces that AI can't touch.

People will have to search for interactions that can't be imitated and have enough value to make it through filters. We will have to literally touch grass. All the time. Interactions that don't affect the grass we touch will vanish from the space of social media and web 2.0 services that have any reason to operate whatsoever. Heat death of the internet has a blast radius, and much of what humans occupy themselves with will turn out to be within that blast radius.

A lot of people will by definition be disappointed that the middle standard deviation of thought on any topic no longer adds anything. At least at first. There used to be a time when the only person you heard on the radio had to be somewhat better than average to be heard. We will return to that kind of media because the value of not having any expertise or first-hand experience will drop to such an immeasurable low that those voices no longer participate or appear to those using filters. Entire swaths of completely replaceable, completely redundant online "community" will just wither to dust, giving us time to touch the grass, hone the 2%, and make sense of other's 2%.

Callers on radio shows used to be interesting because people could have a tiny window into how wildly incorrect and unintelligent some people are. Pre-internet media was dominated by people who were likely slightly above average. Radio callers were something like misery porn or regular-people porn. You could sometimes hear someone with such an awful take that it made you realize that you are not in the bottom 10%. The internet has given us radio callers, all the time, all of them. They flooded Twitter, Reddit, Facebook. They trend and upvote themselves. They make YouTube channels where they talk into a camera with higher quality than commercial rigs from 2005. There is a GDP for stupidity that never existed except as the novelty object of a more legitimate channel. When we "democratized" media, it wasn't exclusively allowing in thoughts and opinions that were higher quality than "mainstream".

The frightening conclusion is possibly that we are living in a kind of heat death now. It's not the AIs that are scary. Its the humans we have platformed. The bait posts on Instagram will be out-competed. Low quality hot takes will be out-competed. Repetitive and useless comments on text forums will be out-competed. Advertising revenue, which is dependent on the idea that you are engaging with someone who will actually care about your product, will be completely disrupted. The entire machine that creates, monetizes, and foments utterly useless information flows in order to harness some of the energy will be wrecked, redundant, shut down.

Right now, people are correct that today's AI is on an adoption curve that would see more AI spam if tomorrow's AI isn't poised to filter out not just spam but a great mass of low-value human-created content. However, when we move to suppress "low quality slop" we will increasingly be filtering out low-quality humans. When making the slop higher quality so that it flies under the radar, we will be increasingly replacing and out-competing the low-quality content of the low-quality human. What remains will be of a very high deductive consistency. Anything that can be polished to a point will be. Only new information outside the reach of the AI and images of distant stars will be beyond the grasp of this convergence.

All of this is to say that the version of the internet where AI is the primary nexus of interaction via inbound and outbound filtering and generation might be the good internet we think we can have if we enact some totalitarian ID scheme to fight against slop that is currently replacing what the bottom 10% of the internet readily consumes anyway.

You are right, the average voter is not worried about any single enforcement outside of CSAM. The people who will exploit this are not just "your average voter".

It’s true, it would cause a great deal of chaos if suddenly every person and business had to comply with fifty-plus different and sometimes contradictory state laws.

But it seems like that’s where we’re headed?

[0] https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artIV-S1-1/AL...

ie, something that shows what was proposed in p2025 and what policies/procedures/orders have pushed a particular part of the plan forward?

Would you say the same about drugs?

Similarly the only expected VPN traffic in my network would be inbound to my wire guard server/router. Everything else can be banned by default.

Pot industry needs to anonymize their customer records or stop using SaaS packaged solutions.

Now if China hacks Meadows or something, they have customer and purchase lists which may include security cleared personnel who can now be blackmailed.

If you run a pot shop, or an SaaS solution for them like Meadows, you really have to figure out how to divorce customer PII from purchases.

I am back to the black market in Oregon for this reason!

You would have to lock down any electronics device that can be used to bypass the restrictions. In reality the best way to do this is to build a screen based nudity filter into the device, which is not only more effective, it exposes this whole nonsense as an attempt to grow the police state.

Not only that, but once you do so, you effectively concede that such censorship is valid to begin with, which can and will be used against you to pass further laws along those lines in the future. And if those laws cannot be implemented without ditching all that privacy you worked so carefully to respect in your compromise, well, too bad about that.

Separately from that, if switching DNS servers is an easy workaround to keep access to porn, kids interested in it will quickly learn how to do so, trading recipes and even downloaded content directly. Ditto with Tor etc.

The fundamental problem here is that it is an attempt to censor something for which there is huge demand among the very group that's being excluded. The only way you can do so that would actually work is full-fledged panopticon, where all communication channels are pervasively monitored.

Still need a solution to age-verify without tracking though, or else people would think of it as something to be turned off immediately since Reddit and X would obviously not be on the registry since they host tremendous amounts of porn.

I don't think that's an intractable problem at all, and I think as technologists we should be putting our efforts into building the most trustworthy system for that instead of just campaigning for nothing to change because it's "the parents' problem." Easy for us to say: We're all either not parents, or we're the type who are equipped to properly filter access to the Internet for our young kids. In reality, the single mom of 3 working 12 hours a day is not equipped to "just" set up a proxy server or figure out how to install internet filtering software on the Amazon Fire tablet she got her 8-year-old to watch Spider-Man.

Of course, that wording is deliberately vague for a reason. Judges, especially conservative ones, have often let states use wording like that to get away with female-toplessness bans, blue laws, religious imagery in government buildings, etc, since that kind of wording lets them avoid including discriminatory language in the law itself, therefore supposedly not violating the constitution.

A tenant is somebody who has a lease, for example to an apartment or one of those big metal sheds for a supermarket, and by analogy, customers of something like Microsoft's "Entra ID" (what was "Azure Active Directory" at least the new name is less confusing)

A tenet is a belief or principle that you believe in absolutely, I think we'd say that this "protects but does not bind / binds but does not protect" idea isn't a tenet of Fascism but instead an observable trait.

https://archive.md/60QZV

From "Data Finds Republicans are Obsessed with Searching for Transgender Porn"[1]:

> So far in 2022, more than 300 anti-LGBT bills have been proposed across 36 states – at least one third of which are directed at trans youth. This surge, especially in anti-trans legislation from Republicans, stands in stark contrast to a startling fact.

> Republicans love transgender porn, a lot.

> With more than 4.7 Million transgender porn related Google searches each month (per Ahrefs.com), do Republicans represent those searching most? The answer seems to be a clear yes.

[1] https://lawsuit.org/general-law/republicans-have-an-obsessio...