8 ms·

There is a surprising amount of engineers who don’t understand what’s happening. So they deal with it as if it’s a funny thing… yeah if two police officers come

• nemomarx 2mo ago
  what's the current solution that's impossible for kids to bypass with a borrowed or stolen id, say? I don't see any proposals yet that will actually work for what they say they'll do.
  • hunterpayne 2mo ago
    You want a proposal? Make a kids-only set of sites. And then make hardware/software that can access only those sites. Make sure existing and future "non-kid" hardware can't access those kids-only sites. You can allow companies to register that they are one of these kid friendly sites with the additional regulation that would entail. Then make a kid having hardware that can access the normal Internet like having a beer in the US. Now perhaps you can find a hole in this, but it can be patched with technology and the right regulation. That we aren't doing something like this gives the game away. How the EU is going about this means the point of all of this has nothing to do with children and everything to do with controlling political speech. PS Yea, I know its a very vague suggestion, it can still be implemented
    • Root_Denied 2mo ago
      One issue that I see with this type of system is that it doesn't allow for parental/guardian oversight of what kids are doing or discussing. Ever gone down the auto-suggestion rabbit hole on YouTube Kids? You start getting into weird and potentially disturbing territory much more quickly than you'd expect.
      • hunterpayne 2mo ago
        That's a good point. However, its possible to police YouTube Kids without destroying free speech. Policing the entire Internet and everyone else...not so much. That's the whole point of having the companies providing "kids" sites to register and have a specific set of regulations about the "kids" sites. Perhaps those regulations include parental controls.
    • Geezus_42 2mo ago
      What's to stop an adult from using the "kids only" hardware?
      • DangitBobby 2mo ago
        Nothing. It won't matter on age appropriate sites.
        • scotty79 2mo ago
          So age appropriate sites could not have any private communication functionalities.
        • Geezus_42 2mo ago
          Then why make non-kid hardware unable to access it? This whole idea is ridiculous and would never work in reality.
          • DangitBobby 2mo ago
            You've mixed it up. They said make the kids' hardware only able to access kid sites, not make it so only kid hardware could access it.
            • froggit 2mo ago
              They actually said: >Make sure existing and future "non-kid" hardware can't access those kids-only sites. Which is the inverse of what i suspect they meant.
            • Geezus_42 2mo ago
              > Make sure existing and future "non-kid" hardware can't access those kids-only sites. No I didn't.
    • cykros 2mo ago
      Seems like a good idea. Who ever heard of a kid getting ahold of a beer?
    • account42 2mo ago
      > You want a proposal? Make a kids-only set of sites. And then make hardware/software that can access only those sites. Make sure existing and future "non-kid" hardware can't access those kids-only sites. You can allow companies to register that they are one of these kid friendly sites with the additional regulation that would entail. Then make a kid having hardware that can access the normal Internet like having a beer in the US. Now perhaps you can find a hole in this, but it can be patched with technology and the right regulation. This is like saying you can stop world hunger by giving everyone food.
  • kelseyfrog 2mo ago
    You have to stop thinking like an engineer and start thinking like a public health official. 'Something impossible for kids to bypass' is not the goal. It's akin to evaluating a flu vaccine on the standard of zero breakthrough cases. Such a standard has no relevance on the efficacy of the vaccine. Likewise for underage internet access. Proponents would be happily satisfied with 90% compliance. They really don't care that coverage isn't complete or circumvention is complete. Once you realize that, you can start constructing counterarguments that dismantle the claim that digital IDs would solve the problems they're supposed to.
  • intrasight 2mo ago
    Lots have been made. It's not a hard technical problem.
  • shuwix 2mo ago
    Yup. Everything can be bypassed by kids as they have time, motivation and learn new stuff with blink of an eye. Just like we once were.
• b112 2mo ago
  Here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49080929 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49080929 There is discussion about LLMs, models, CSAM, undressing people with AI, and posting those images to places. No handy wavy stuff, makes this problem go away due to filtering at creation. That's because, open models are a thing. So you either ban all open models, or maybe make it a crime to publish uncensored models, or you punish what individuals do on the internet. Slander and libel and defamation are a thing, and have been a thing forever, millennia. Suddenly, on the open and free internet, for barely an eyeblink, anyone could say anything with zero liability and responsibility. Then, 2010s came. Then, doxing of people we didn't like, or didn't agree with, became OK. So suddenly, it was OK to "out" a person, but not to just force everyone to be de-anonymoized. In other words, unpopular opinions? Yeah, that's OK to remove the cloak. And with AI, everyone and their dog will be able to render images of anyone they want naked. CSAM. Political lies, made up videos, slander, libel, literal wors in people's mouths, on and on. What's my point? Well, just as 2000 brought a new world to people, 2025 is doing the same. This is only going to get worse. And I fully agree, the dangers for "control" are going to exist. But the dangers of people posting all of this stuff, has hit the point where a lot of people are uncomfortable with it. And if you think Grok creating CSAM is bad, then you must think anyone creating CSAM is bad. Or anything. So how to you prevent the harm? Well really, you either heavily restrict software. Open LLMs, or? You make people posting this stuff liable. The world is at a fork. Everything will change. Because banning software requires immense control over hosting software, but so does deanonymizing the internet. And really, this is inline with how the political and societal landscape changes. It's only been 20 years since a lot of people were on the Internet, and only 10 years since I'd label it 'mainstream'. As in, even grandma uses it. And so, now the laws are coming, as legislation and law and change takes time for politicians, and political bodies. We're here. Right now. This is the moment. So I 100% guarantee that absolutely nothing will stop the path to liability for slander, libel, and more that is coming. Nothing. Whatever it takes, you can be sure it will happen. So how will it happen? Well, by knowing who to sue. Like it or not, that's the truth. And no, I don't like it myself.
  • Someone100 2mo ago
    Who cares if they undress people with AI. Its slop and not worth restricting liberties over it.
• felooboolooomba 2mo ago
  They're just protecting the kids, at least to start with.
  • matchstickman23 2mo ago
    From what?
    • hart_russell 2mo ago
      I truly believe unfettered access to endless scroll dopamine is bad for adults, but even more terrible for a developing mind. It reduces attention span, increases anxiety, etc. Pushing the onus on parents for healthy internet consumption is probably not effective because most families have both parents working jobs and can't be on top of their kids 24/7. Now... how to effectively address this problem without introducing a dystopian surveillance state? I don't have a good answer.
      • HDBaseT 2mo ago
        Zero Knowledge Proofs, but the fact this isn't being implemented, despite various popular open source implementation existing [0], speaks volume. [0] https://github.com/google/longfellow-zk https://github.com/google/longfellow-zk
        • permo-w 2mo ago
          probably because it's being explained about as well as your comment or this repo manages to
        • account42 2mo ago
          How about adding a blockchain and AI to complete the buzzword bingo?
      • skinfaxi 2mo ago
        > Pushing the onus on parents for healthy internet consumption is probably not effective because most families have both parents working jobs and can't be on top of their kids 24/7. So, the choice is surveillance state or nothing? I guess we choose not to solve the actual issue of overstressed parents working too much to parent their kids because there is no way to profit from that.
• yorwba 2mo ago
  The last time I had police knocking at my door, it was a lot more than two, and they were readying their battering ram when I opened, and then immediately swarmed me and told me to sit down, and then I just explained and they realized their warrant was for a different address and they left. It was scary in the moment, but I never had a gun pointed at me and I wasn't even touched, so overall it left me with a rather positive impression of how search warrants are executed in Germany. By all means, if you have an adversarial relationship with the state, fight every expansion of its power tooth and nail. But conversely, if you think that everything is going basically fine and the police are reasonable folks overall, then giving them more power doesn't look like a slippery slope straight to dystopia.
  • nate_meurer 2mo ago
    > giving them more power doesn't look like a slippery slope straight to dystopia. This only makes sense if you have no concept of "future", wherein different, less reasonable people can gain power. This should be especially obvious in Germany, where an adversarial relationship with the state can easily be had by merely criticizing it.
    • fyredge 2mo ago
      The solution then seems to be holding people in power accountable, no? Digital ID or not, the situation won't improve until we get actual representation that works for the people.
      • cnd78A 2mo ago
        > The solution, then, seems to be holding people in power accountable, no? The problem is that this is an extremely difficult step to achieve, because it does not simply depend on the will of the people. It depends on cultural evolution. Human beings are not naturally rational; like other species, we are driven by evolutionary processes that are often irrational and self-interested. Most countries—and, more specifically, the majority of their citizens—have not yet reached this stage of civilizational development. The French are far from it, and I believe the Germans are as well. Despite belonging to the generation that emerged from a relatively recent period of cultural barbarism, Germany is currently supporting what is considered as the greatest genocide and one of the gravest sets of war crimes of our time. So I would not overestimate the level of civilization of a population whose majority appears unconcerned by what I see as such an obvious moral failure. In my view, one of the roots of human barbarism is the tendency to overestimate either human nature itself or the moral achievements of one's own culture.
• cykros 2mo ago
  Kids can't bypass it because the systems they're trying to access are entirely different than they were in 1995. They are not accessing "the Internet" on which they connect to their friend's BBS's, irc servers, Usenet, etc. They're large, private systems which can absolutely be locked down by the parties that own them, on which activity has largely been centered. Kids CAN absolutely bypass a lot still. Jump on Nostr and nobody can stop anyone -- a server can be run on any device (mine is on my phone), and it'll even run on non-TCP/IP networks (FIPS is in early days and still largely runs on existing infrastructure but absolutely doesn't rely on it staying there). Give it another few months with some LoRA build out (and enough motivation for the kids) and even the ISP gateway stops being a filter point. Not that ISP level controls have ever really been the most effective anyway, given the existence of VPN's and other tunneling methods (to say nothing of public wifi networks). We see this happening in real time as India tries to stamp out Bitchat. The codebase has appeared on more and more repositories, and the most recent version of Bitchat is capable of transmitting itself for install to other devies without relying on any server or Internet at all. So should we push back? Of course. At some point we would need to worry that they'll say enough is enough and make the hardware itself inaccessible. We're a long way off from that, and it'd be a surefire way to get a LOT more pushback. But in the meantime, we shouldn't despair too much. The cypherpunks that gave us private and secure access on the Internet used by everyone today despite being once illegal to export didn't go anywhere. They're still here, kicking down every wall that gets put up, or at least pointing out that there are multiple ways around (or through) it.
• rurban 2mo ago
  You've seen Australia. Every kid who wanted had access to forbidden social media. The control bit is the dangerous one, sure.