Carl

It’s because you only need to take an oath if you’re testifying. And arguing isn’t testifying. Lawyers are already bound by ethics standards for things like lying. For instance, if a lawyer knows you killed someone, they can’t openly say you didn’t.

They can argue that the evidence is lacking. They can argue that the prosecution hasn’t done enough to prove your guilt. They can find gaps in the prosecution’s case and start poking holes to provide reasonable doubt. But they can’t put a witness on the stand who they know is going to lie in your defense. And that includes themselves. Also, no lawyer would want to take the stand, because then the opposing lawyer would have a chance to cross-examine them directly while they’re under oath, and likely have them testify against their own client. It would be a very big can of worms.

And it’ll only take one NYC resident to challenge that before the requirement is outlawed. If it doesn’t require proof of address to sign up, it shouldn’t require proof of address to cancel.

I actually just updated my post to clarify how child/teen accounts would be handled without needing direct verification. No hash needed for minors, meaning there is no risk of this. I think we danced around each other while posting, because I saw the notification for your comment as soon as I finalized my edit.

I’d be fully in favor of hardware-level age verification. And by that, I mean we already have the technology to securely and privately verify your age directly with the government, (not using a third-party), and so no single organization has a chance to collect more than a salted hash of your info. Then your user account (or the entire device, if you’re using a phone) would be considered verified. It would require governments to actually cooperate and be technologically literate, (which… Yeah… I know that makes it a pipe dream) but it is technologically feasible to implement.

The short version is as follows:

1. Governments have citizens create a password. Ideally this would happen when they’re applying for their ID, which they would need to have to verify their age anyways. This password and salt is used for their hashed info.
2. The government sets up a database of salted hashed info, along with a simple Boolean pass/fail for whether or not the individual is an adult. Again, this is only using salted hashes, (the same method we use to securely store passwords) so there is no recognizable data even if it gets intercepted in transit.
3. The government publishes a service that intakes a hash, and returns a true/false for whether that hash matches an adult in their database. Again, no actual PII is stored in this database, only salted hashes.
4. The user who wants to verify their age inputs their info into their device using standardized inputs, along with the password they created when they applied for their ID. This is hashed directly on the device, just like a password is hashed before it is sent to a website. This hash is the only info that leaves the device.
5. Whatever service that is trying to verify your age takes this hash, passes it to that government database, and receives a pass/fail result. If you pass, your age is now verified. Congrats!
   (a) Note that the company never received your PII, they only received the salted hash, and only received a basic Boolean 1/0 response from the government server. They never even received your exact age.
   (b) Note that the government never received any info about your device, so they can’t use it to track you at a hardware level. They simply saw Microsoft/Google/Apple/etc. asking about a hash.
6. Now that account is verified, and can be used to automatically bypass any age-gates on any devices it is used on.
   (a) For example, if your Microsoft account is verified, any computer you log into with it will also be verified while you’re logged in. If your Apple/Google account is verified, your phone/tablet is verified when you’re logged into it. This could also allow adult accounts to set up restricted child/teen accounts for shared devices like desktops or tablets. Allowing those children/teens access to age-appropriate content without needing to deal with verifying them independently, because the child/teen account was made with a verified adult account so the age range on those restricted accounts can also be trusted.
7. This could even cut out the middleman and verify the device directly using that same government service, but that would need to come with some extra security precautions (which I’m not smart enough to devise) to be sure the government isn’t able to collect verification attempts and tie individuals to the specific hardware devices that made those requests.

And then the verified device can directly pass a “yes this user is over 18” flag directly to any service that needs it. Sites simply ask for an age range. A verified account would automatically respond as “Adult”. A restricted child/teen account (created by a verified account) would automatically respond with “child” or “teen” respectively. And an unverified unrestricted account wouldn’t respond (or would respond as unverified) which would prompt sites to automatically hit them with the age verification gate. This age range check could all be done securely during the initial TLS handshake, before the site even begins to load. Ideally, it would be a fairly wide age range, to prevent data collection services from simply going “oh this user was reporting their age as 14 yesterday and now they’re 15. Now we know their birthday is today.”

This would all allow websites and services to verify ages on the backend, without actually needing to use third-party services. It would also allow for a much smoother user experience, with verified adult users being able to automatically bypass any kind of age gates. And unverified users trying to watch porn would probably automatically get redirected to a “your device isn’t verified, here is why, here is how to verify it” page. No concerns about kids lying and clicking the “yes I’m over 18” button, because they never even see a button to click. They just immediately get redirected to YouTube as soon as the site sees that they’re not verified as an adult.

It’s really the best of all worlds. It allows for secure verification, where the only info leaving your device is scrambled. It appeases the “think of the children” politicians and allows them to put their name on something. It allows us to ditch the stupid fucking “click here if you’re over 18” pages. And most importantly, it would actually protect kids, because now preventing them from accessing mature content is as simple as protecting your passwords. Because your kid can’t just steal your ID to verify their device without also having your password.

But again, none of this will ever happen because the data companies are the ones pushing for age verification laws. They want to insert themselves as the only viable third-party for verification, because they want to be able to collect all of our data. And that means the inevitable age verification methods will be the least insecure, most invasive methods imaginable. I’ve been saying for a while now that we should work to give politicians a better method, to stop them from implementing the worst shit that lobbyists can pay for. But lobbyists can pay, so their suggestions will go a lot farther even if they’re less secure.

Yeah, phones are fine for passing the time until your train goes into a tunnel. Then you’re just stuck with your own thoughts, trying to stave off the existential dread without anything to keep you distracted. One of the nicest parts about an ereader is that in an age where everything is always online, they still work when offline.

We don’t want them, and we elected officials to block them. If our elected officials ignore us, and accept the bribes to build them despite what we want, then we are perfectly within our rights as citizens to burn them to the ground.

Something something Four Boxes of Liberty.

For the unaware, the Four Boxes is a concept that describes the four ways the average person has to impact public policy. The first is the soap box. Use your voice. If that soap box is taken away, you move to the second box.

The second box is the ballot box. Even if you’ve been silenced (via things like shadowbanning, having your content suppressed, being prosecuted for talking about it in public, etc) then you can still vote to enact change. Ideally, your representative would represent you and push for the change you want.

The third box is the jury box. If someone is on trial for a crime that was morally justified, the jury can simply refuse to find them guilty. For instance, if someone is on trial for cutting down a Flock camera, the jury would be fully within their rights to find them innocent despite all evidence. Once enough people support a particular change, a jury can reliably grind the cogs of the legal system to a halt.

And the last box of liberty is the ammo box. If all else fails, they have removed jury trials, representatives don’t represent the people, people aren’t free to discuss change, etc, then the ammo box is the last resort.

With regards to this specific incident, we’re somewhere between the third and fourth boxes. An angry mob burning down a data center is solidly in the fourth box, and the third box will come into play once prosecutors start trying to charge individual people with crimes because of it. But it’s important to remember that the third and fourth boxes were only touched because the first and second boxes failed.

In this economy, we can’t afford to just burn perfectly good RAM. Angry mobs should always remember to pillage first, then burn.

They’ll still be available. They’ll just be prohibitively expensive for the average person, because their cost won’t be subsidized by the data collection.

Your TV example is actually great, because you can easily get a dumb TV… As long as you’re willing to pay 3x as much for it. Commercial displays are meant to be used for things like digital signage in lobbies, digital menus in restaurants, meeting room displays, hospital patient listings at nurse stations and patient TVs inside of each hospital room, etc… They’re truly dumb displays (sometimes they have things like wireless display mirroring and AirPlay ready to go, to make things like meetings easier), and they don’t have any data collection. But they’re more expensive, because the corporate clients are paying for reliability and consistency.

Because corporate clients are concerned with things like HIPAA violations at a nurse’s station, and corporate espionage. Imagine if patient info leaked because a smart TV was listening to nurses conversations and running OCR on the patient info displayed on the screen. Imagine if corporate secrets leaked because a meeting room TV was sending screenshots of a PowerPoint presentation back to the manufacturer.

So yes, dumb appliances are 100% still going to be available. They simply won’t be affordable, because individuals aren’t the target market. The target market is corporate clients. Dumb fridges will still be a thing in professional kitchens, because no restaurant manager wants to deal with a smart fridge. But that dumb fridge will be designed with professional kitchens in mind. It won’t fit in a standard house’s kitchen, because it’s not designed for that.

That’s the joke. Tech companies have started taking away basic functions, so they can then sell it back to you as a subscription. BMW’s heated seat subscription comes to mind. All BMWs are equipped with heated seats by default, but you can only turn the heater on if you pay a subscription for it.