FRESH
Hacker News
Hacker News Hacker NewsI a small server operator and a client of the internet will not participate in any other methods period, full-stop. Make simple logical and rational laws around RTA headers and I will participate. Many sites already voluntarily add this header. It is trivial to implement. Many questions and a lengthy discussion occurred here [1]. I doubt my little private and semi-private sites would be noticed but one day it may come to that at which point it's back into semi-private Tinc open source VPN meshes for my friends and I.
I went on vacation to Tennessee and tried to log in and it said I needed to verify with their identity verification provider. Of course I refused.
Now I am home in a different state and still cannot log in. I contacted support and because I was detected in TN once irrespective of my name and address and credit card info in their system they refuse to let me back in.
Support said they canceled my subscriptions for me because you can't even access that part of your account.
It's ridiculous this is where things have landed. And it's not even stopping porn in the slightest it's just making it harder for honest people to pay for what they like. And so the government can track us more easily. Wish I could do something other than vote with my wallet.
The future of your family and your legacy is up to you, not the government. We don't need age verification to restrict the social darwinism of raising children.
Mandatory age surveillance everywhere is only going to result in massive, normalized ID fraud. You thought fake and stolen IDs were a problem before? You haven't seen anything yet.
And half of it will be from adults trying to avoid privacy invasion.
I grew up around a lot of the hacker ethos, open internet, Information Wants To Be Free etc… feels like a part of my identity is being striped away by my government.
That solution doesn't negate parental freedom of choice, it facilitates it.
I am baffled at how often the "they don't want it, because of their ulterior surveillance motivations, therefore it isn't a solution" argument is made. "They" don't want it because it is a solution to the nominal problem, that they cannot abuse, and would negate their ability to use it as a cover with a large well-meaning voting constituency.
Two problems, nominal and ulterior, resolved in the right way by one solution.
When a nominally sensible problem is used as a cover for overreach, solving the nominal problem in a healthy way is the best offense. The alternative is an endless war of attrition, and the "hope" that politicians resist the efforts of well-paid lobbyists and tens of millions of well-meaning voting parents forever. That is a ridiculous strategy, doomed to fail, delivering irreversible damage. As is already evident by the abusable laws that are accumulating.
I worry at the lack of political acumen and foot-gun reflexes in the ethically-motivated technical community.
Stop endlessly fighting to lose less. Just play the winning move already. Stop the irreversible damage.
If you are going to implement age controls, you should implement a ban on underage influencers as well.
You could define a set of 5 or six categories (nudity, sex, drugs, violence, etc.) and have a scale from 1 to 10 for each. Each content producer would rate each category according to defined criteria.
Then each user, or their parent, can set what their own acceptable level is. If you set your violence level at 4 then nothing level 5 or higher will load.
Would you vote for that? Prove who you are to visit this website? Would you do it to access Hacker News? Your newspaper?
Didn’t think so.
Humans are inherently social, and social networks are based on trust. Trust is primarily a function of reputation, peer pressure, and legal consequences. Reputation requires tying behavior to a stable identity. Peer pressure only works when you’re not anonymous. For there to be legal consequences for bad behavior, we must identify bad actors. I don’t see why anyone would want to remove any of this. To protect some freelance journalists in Iran?
Also I don’t think that the “pro privacy” activists really understand the scale and severity of harm being done to children through the internet. I as a programmer who makes my living on the internet, would gladly support the shutting down of the whole internet if it would save the life of a single precious child.
Bad: some still entertain the idea that we should do age verification using some sort of crypto primitives
There is no reason for age verification at all.
I am from the goatse generation. Rotten.com. steakandcheese. Horrific stuff tbh, I mostly stayed away from it, and I didn't need a helicopter government to protect me from it.
The moment you accept the narrative that kids need to be protected from the Internet you have already lost.
You've already condemned those kids to a life of slavery. So much for protecting them.
What we need is not online verification, but a competent government that does its existing job well.
Who's been arrested over the Epstein files? Who is protecting those kids?
No one.
That same government wants to "protect" your kids by KYCing everyone.
Give me a break.
Their guide:
https://www.eff.org/files/2026/04/09/condensed-age_verificat...
Unfortunately, their most prominent call to action doesn't seem to address the various state-specific and non-US legislation (focusing on KOSA instead). Here it is:
This is not only unnecessary, but will with 100% certainty lead to negative downstream affects, either via leaks, or the state being able to find people for things that aren't crimes once they're adults.
There's simply no good reason for it that outweighs the bad. But what it really boils down to is completely unnecessary.
Responsible parents don't have separate OS accounts for their children.
I find it disgusting that most laws today are based on creating a perfect world instead of addressing harms in the least intrusive way. There is no balancing of interests, even when they state that there are. Every side complains about the others and potential future abuses, except when it is their plan. Nobody tries to design the law with a devil's advocate perspective to make as effective as reasonably possible (not perfect!) while limiting overreach.
The real problem is the pursuit of perfection. A perfect world does not exist, nor will it ever (laws of nature, physics, etc). One person's view of perfect is not the same as another's. We've lost the capacity for legislative empathy through are impatience and self importance. It's no longer about restricting government and providing people with rights. It's about how we can use government to shove the desires of a majority or plurality onto the total population.
There are ways to do age verification with reasonable anonymity, but they aren't perfect and can create underground markets (see gaming in China). At a certain point, we need to step back and put the responsibilities where they belong - with parents, instead of causing massive negative externalities on everyone else.
Yeah, yeah, but the children...
Not if it's done in a half arsed way. I'm in the UK and so far my age verification has involved doing a selfie with the webcam for Reddit. That's it. No one needing my name, ID number etc. (Apart from banks of course).
Really this is just the modern equivalent of putting the porn mags on the top shelf at the newsagent to stop the kids getting them. We don't need more.
Saw it with the UK laws. It just gets rammed through. Whether it’s ignorance, malice, hidden force, a desire for surveillance state, genuine concern for children - doesn’t matter, the forces in favour are substantially more and seemingly motivated to try over and over until it sticks.
Much like brexit or for that matter trump reelection I just don’t have much faith in wisdom of the democratic collective consensus anymore and I don’t think it’ll get any better in an AI misinformation echo chamber world. Onwards into dystopia
Exceeding gloomy take I know
(it's because it's not about protecting children)
How did you think this was going to be enforced?
But we don't have that, so he's probably right.
Now, the question is: what should the implementation details of online censorship be?
People should not be able to misrepresent themselves on the internet, it may have been safe in low volumes but it is scary now and will be outright dangerous as a modality in the hands of AI agents. If you think teen mental health is bad now, wait until social media campaign capabilities previously only available to nation states fall into the hands of ordinary school bullies.
Maybe age verification isn't the way to mitigate this obvious risk, but there has to be something that can be done to stop rampant sockpuppeting.
Your nextdoor neighbor whose misbehaving child that's permanently on their phone? Help them out.
Your friend that joked about sending death threats to someone? Scold and report him.
That girl endlessly scrolling Instagram? Get her help.
Please take a step back and examine how insane the internet is and how it's affecting our everyday lives. Political violence and mental illness is increasing, and the internet is solely to blame for this.
"If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary." Federalist 51
We're all too familiar with the latter part of that quote, but we're completely oblivious to the former. At this point, we've all but proven that the government needs to step in and regulate internet access. And unfortunately for us, they're going to do it in the most dystopian, authoritarian way possible.
I want to be on the side of freedom and strike this bill down. But when it is struck down, everyone is going to cheer, go on their merry way, and continue to let demorilization, radicalization, and mental illness infect the psyche of the everyday human being, and do nothing about it. And then the cycle will repeat itself.
At this point, I actually hope this bill passes. Not because I want it to, but because maybe then everyone will stop using the internet for everything, and some sanity will return.
> Every website. Every platform. Every app. Every service. Your children will never know what it was like to think freely online. They will never explore ideas anonymously. They will never question authority without it being logged in their permanent profile. They will never speak freely without fear that every word will be used...
No. Nobody's proposing you need to verify your identity to read articles on the New York Times or Wikipedia or political blogs. And nobody is proposing you need to verify your identity to leave comments on a news article or blog post. And any proposed law around that would run into massive first-amendment constitutional hurdles. It would be struck down easily.
There's always going to be a spectrum of websites that range from open and anonymous (like news and political discussion) to strongly identity-verified (like online banking). I don't like online age verification for particular sites, but at the same time I think it's completely misleading to see it as this slippery slope to a world where anonymous speech no longer exists.
We can have reasoned arguments around how people's usage of sites is tracked and how to prevent that, without making this about free speech and "the hill to die on".
The author has said a lot about what kind of future awaits with mass surveillance and AI, but I believe it’s not enough. Technofascism Is not that far away.
States have broad power to do what is being feared in the thread and haven’t already and to think that they’re waiting for this final piece of the puzzle to enact some insane regime is laughable. They could do that right now without the internet at all.
Social media is probably not healthy and kids should probably not be on social media. Age verification and age limits for social media will be a good thing for kids.
Instead of fear mongering, finding a middle ground, like governments adding some rules and protections on how this information or system is used is probably a better response.
I might be in the minority, but I think incorporating an identity layer into the internet itself should happen with the right protections for users and should have happened at the beginning of the net and is probably a result of lack of foresight by the creators of ARPANET.
It is easy to defend on the motte hill (protection of children, protection against abuse and heinous crimes), and easy to expand and farm on the bailey (universal surveillance, mass data collection, and the erosion of privacy).
When you set up kids devices in your family they ask you to provide the birthday anyway.
I’m keen to see the arguments against this.
Braindead meme. "Age verification" is not a "Trojan Horse". No one, regardless of age, _wants_ to use age verification. They are being effectively _forced_ to ask for it or use it. Age verification (identity verification) is a tradeoff. A "Trojan Horse" is something that people actually want, not an obvious tradeoff, a sacrifice, a compromise. No one is being "fooled" into complying with identity verification in the form of age verification
The surveillance state is already operational. If you use "platforms" then you are already inside the gates with the enemy. The surveillance apparatus is operated by so-called "tech" companies that perform data collection, surveillance and online ad services as a "business model". These companies provide access to and information about internet users to advertisers and law enforcement
If "age verification" dissuades some people from accessing "platforms" (servers) run by so-called "tech" companies, then that is a loss for the companies and a privacy gain for those people. The "hill to die on" is not using "platforms"
These companies are the reason that "age verification" is proceeding. They push the allegedly harmful content because it makes money for them. Further, the companies' "platforms" make "age verification" possible. This is because they intermediate transmissions between internet users through these so-called "platforms". Governments need not comply with laws that protect individuals from government surveillance when they can target "platforms" instead
It is disturbing that anyone would want to "die on a hill" to save "platforms" from "age verification". These third parties are surveillance companies. They built the surveillance state. They already know who you are, they do not need government-issued ID
If the people spreading this "Trojan Horse" meme cared about surveillance, including identity verification, then they would not be defending "platforms" from regulation, they would stop using the "platforms"
Private entities being frontrunners in AI Fear either means that these companies have too much unchecked power or that they have are covert instruments of governments.
https://www.euractiv.com/news/greece-to-ban-anonymity-on-soc...
This one-sided view has some good points, but for goodness sake, don't pretend that the alternative has no downsides.
Um, no? iOS is doing age verification just by your credit card. I never saw people all that upset about giving their credit card info to their phone wallet app or even to a bunch of websites.
Kids should not be able/allowed to buy/use devices that are dangerous for them
But the device itself should not care at the fallacious idea “it might be able to”
The reason we are up shit creek is because large companies didn't want to spend 2-5% of profits on decent editorial controls to stop bad actors making money from bending societal red lines (ie pile ons, snuff videos, the spectrum of grift, culture of abusing the "other side")
They also didn't want to stop the "viral" factor that allows their networks to grow so fucking fast.
This isn't really about freedom of speech, its about large media companies not wanting to take responsibility for their own shit.
meta desperately want kids to sign up. There are no penalties for them pushing shit on them. If an FCC registered corp had done half the shit facebook did, they'd have been kicked off air and restructured.
So frankly its too fucking late. Meta, google and tiktok will still find ways to push low quality rage bate to all of us, and divide us all for advertising revenue.
The Cashier Standard – Age Verification Without Surveillance
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47809795
https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/7fe74381-a683-4f49-9c2b-1...
What is fascinating is to see how governments ALL fall for it. There is zero resistance. This is fascinating to me. It shows how little real effort is necessary once you have the lobbyists in place. Kind of scary to witness too.
It is an apartheid system. All apartheid slavery systems will eventually die, so age sniffing will die too. But it will most likely be a long fight as more and more money will be invested by crazy corporations such as Palantir and others.
The whole "debate" is already not logical by the way. Let's for a moment assume the "but but but the kids!" is a real argument rather than a strawman argument, which it is. Ok so ... I am a "concerned parent", for the sake of discussion. I have three young kids. I am not a tech nerd. The kids see "unfitting content" on the antisocial media such as facebook and what not. So, what do I do? Well ... they have a smartphone? Aha, so ... I am not so concerned? Having no smartphone is no option? Ok so ... I say they can have a smartphone, but they may not use antisocial media. Ok. First - in any free society, is it acceptable that this kind of censorship is done on ALL kids? What if I, as a parent, do not agree with this? Well, tough luck - the laws force you into the age sniffing routine suddenly. But, even those parents who want the state to act as totalitarian: why would I want to hand over control to ANY politician for that matter? That makes no sense to me. I am aware that some parents may think differently, but do all parents think like that, even IF they buy into the "we protect the children" lie? I don't want ANY information from ANY of my computers to go into private hands here. So the whole argument already makes zero sense from the get go.
Of course those who know how things work, they know that this is the build up towards identifying everyone on the world wide web at all times AND to make access to information conditional, e. g. if the state does not know you, you can not access information. Aka a passport system for the www. Built right into the operating system too. Windows already complied. MacOSX too. The battle for Linux will be interesting; it may be some hybrid situation, like systemd. And the systemd distributions will all succumb to age sniffing, courtesy of Poettering "this is really harmless if we store your age in the database, just trust me".
People will show what they are made of.
The writing style of the author is very annoying.
It's also ironic that this guy is so adamant about protecting the children on xitter. It's like preaching against racism on 4chan.
> If you want the best for your children, you must stop online age verification.
> Your children are being targeted. The infrastructure being built under the cover of child safety is designed to enslave them for the rest of their lives.
Jumped the shark on that one, and really off-color. I'm less inclined to listen to guy, not because of his actual points, but because of how unreasonable he sounds when articulating them. A great lesson in how not to do rhetoric.
I can see why it's unfortunate but the idea posited that that it's somehow illegal in the US is ridiculous. You have no right to watch porn anonymously at the expense of holding porn companies liable for distributing porn to minors.
Internet 1.0 was largely read only, ephemeral, or decentralized. Chat rooms, IRC, personal webpages, etc. There was anonymity and there were not age restricted services.
Internet 2.0 introduced age restricted services and the enforcement lagged. The enforcement is now catching up. You can still do all the Internet 1.0 things anonymously but you can no longer gamble online as a 14 year old and hopefully soon you wont be able to watch porn either.