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Age Verification Is Coming for the Whole Internet (nymag.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 277 points 1 year ago (39 children)

Hell no. Just use decentralized apps, fediverse etc. It's not about "protecting" children. It's about full control and power. So don't give up.

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  • [–] 68 points 1 year ago* (11 children)

    It’s about the information vacuum. Now every service will get your ID or photo, giving them both age and a whole sort of other metrics to build a profile on you. And yes, Lemmy.ca doesn’t know that about me.

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  • [–] 40 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    I gotta be honest I thought I’d never be able to quit Reddit. But it was a lot easier when I just did it. If this shit becomes the norm, I’ll back out of a site first time they try that shit and block the site. Maybe I’ll just have to stop using the internet. Wouldn’t that be a net positive on my life. You made me do this, capitalism.

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  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago* (3 children)

    You made me do this, capitalism.

    This is a problem with Government not an economic system. It's about control, not dollars, pounds, or yuan.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago

    Capitalism runs on top of government. Governments create and enforce the notion that a human, or a fictional human with fractional ownership (corporation), can in turn own arbitrarily large and important objects.

    This is often done at the behest of said arbitrarily-large-and-important-thing-owners, who also come up with other similarly terrible ideas to have the government do.

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  • [–] 31 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    But this scene was set by capitalism. The family friendly, market friendly internet is the basis for this entire issue. Yeah, government is the one finally pulling the trigger on sanctioned, total control, but we’ve been surveilled and profiled and censored for decades at this point by countless corporations for ad dollars. We’ve gone through the cycles of outrage and acquiescence and outrage and acquiescence as things have gotten worse and worse—same goes for the quality of politician, all bought and paid for by telecom companies neutering everything we can do to make the market and internet more favorable while the politicians got worse and worse and we began accepting it and just laughing it off.

    And here we are. Don’t be fooled, this is 100% at the feet of capitalism.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago*

    every service will get your ID or photo

    To be fair, that's not how it will work. The site and the identity verifier will be two different things, the verifier only attests that you are not underage and the site doesn't get your identity.

    Still harmful though, because you can be sure that there will be scamsites redirecting people to fake but real looking verifiers for blackmail and identity theft purposes.

    I for one will never put my ID or photo into any age verifier ever.

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  • [+] 1 point 1 year ago (4 children)
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  • [+] 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)
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  • [–] 46 points 1 year ago* (18 children)

    decentralized apps, fediverse

    Those apps and / or the fediverse itself would get sued into the ground and shut down one app or server at a time. There's nothing stopping any Governments authorities from going after servers inside their borders and there's nothing stopping them from "harmonizing" identity verification restrictions among other countries. They've already done it once with Intellectual Property law.

    This push to de-anonymize the Internet isn't new either. Microsoft started this back in the oughts with their Passport / Digital-ID program. Google and Meta, along with others, long ago launched their own versions and it's why you can sign into so many websites with a Google or Facebook account.

    It's generally referred to as IdP and now that the Internet has been fully corporatized, with minor holdouts, you can bet your bippy that the days of anonymous access are ending.

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  • [–] 15 points 1 year ago (13 children)

    You'd need to decentralize the Internet itself. Good luck with that one...

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (12 children)

    What do you mean by that? Most of the infrastructure that makes up the internet is owned by like 6 companies.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago (7 children)

    I2p exists

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    So do a million different forms of encryption. That doesn't make the infrastructure any less centralized. If the people who own the fiber decide to only allow pre-approved types of traffic to cross their networks then it doesn't make any difference what sort of protocols exist. Building free cross-country or subsea fiber routes is not economically viable and the internet doesn't exist without them.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    Please look into how i2p works. It’s not just some form of encryption.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Please explain how you can bypass carrier enforced traffic shaping policy.

    From geti2p.net:

    I2P's protocols are efficient on most platforms, including cell phones, and secure for most threat models. However, there are several areas which require further improvement to meet the needs of those facing powerful state-sponsored adversaries, and to meet the threats of continued cryptographic advances and ever-increasing computing power.

    The people involved in the project you're referring to acknowledge that governments can, by influencing carrier policy, disrupt and subvert the project's intended function. Why then are you implying they are incorrect?

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)
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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    While there are interesting projects in that list, everything that I see is either only useful in a local setting, like wireless mesh networks and their derivative protocols, or assumes that no one is actively restricting what can be transmitted over the privately owned long haul fiber networks that make up the backbone of the internet. How would someone in Seattle transmit more data than can be sent via a ham radio equivalent signal to someone in New York without the use of those fiber networks?

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    infrastructure that makes up the internet is owned by like 6 companies.

    GAFAM holds a large chunk of social media HTTP/S traffic, plus cloud crap. That's all application layer.
    Do they own main trunk IP routers too?

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    They do wade into the IP / transport territory a bit but those are not the 6 companies I was referring to. I was thinking of Verizon / AT&T / Lumen / Zayo / etc.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    Those for sure... in the US.
    Which international ties to they have? I know Vodafone is present in a lot of countries (the brand, it's a different company altogether in each country) but don't know many more... nor do i know of any that has a global monopoly of network nodes.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    Lumen and Verizon both have subsea cable connections to Europe. EXA Infrastructure is in the process of acquiring Aqua Comms, both of which own subsea cables. Google, MS, and Meta have all invested in subsea infrastructure to varying degrees as well. These are not monopolies in the classic sense of the word but they're not exactly owned by benevolent interests either.

    That said, the point is that a malicious government with sufficient pull, for example the current Trump administration, wouldn't have to bully very many people to severely limit the flow of information between North America and Europe. So much of the internet depends on US infrastructure that this wouldn't be terribly far off from censoring the entire internet. In that scenario there isn't much that can be done about it. Europe can control their own information flow to Asia and Africa but at minimum this would be a severe disruption for a significant amount of time. Other entities might take such an opportunity to impose their own restrictions and make the situation even worse.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Last time I checked, the p!rate bay still exists. In fact there are many of them. Because the website itself is open source. The same could be done with any other site. If one gets taken down, two more pop up in it's place.

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  • [–] 14 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    Also apps that don't need servers. Switched to this for staying in touch with family p2p, works surprisingly well https://keet.io/

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Got this response from one of the developers:

    Looks like a routing issue, it works when navigated to from the index page without a full reload.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    Its a server configuration issue. If you have a SPA even server side frameworks that uses native paths you need to configure the server to send all requests to the main application. You'll find documentation of how to do this in the setup for every framework I've run into.

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