It looked great and I wanted to try it, but it doesn't work on the web and my smartphone is rejected with no clear explanation ("missing some security mechanisms"); probably because I'm running LineageOS with MicroG.
How does that help Facebook? They already have plenty of signals to guess their users' age, what would they do with an other one? They are not going to ban children anyway.
The OS should start labeling everybody as a child by default. Forbid Facebook to show ads and any harming content by default. The OS has little less to lose with this approach than FB.
FB etc. may argue "device says this user is an adult", even though device may say that only because the parents don't set up separate user accounts e.g. shared family iPad, or because the kids being more tech savvy in the first place like we all were when I myself was a kid.
Every one of these age assurance laws basically says:
1. The OS vendor must provide an age bucket using the minimum amount of data necessary
2. App vendors (i.e. Facebook) must use the OS vendor's age buckets to determine age
The idea is that the next time Facebook gets hit with a child endangerment lawsuit, they can say "Well, we used the age buckets the government told us to, and they said the plaintiff was 18+, so we're not liable".
This, of course, assumes that most social media and Internet regulation will continue being targeted at children only, both because courts are reluctant to enforce 1A on laws that censor children[0] and because the current political class actually benefits from the harms Facebook does to adults. Like, a good chunk of government surveillance is just buying data from Google and Facebook.
[0] The root password to the US constitution is "th1nk0fth3cHIldren!!1" after all
They also added this page since I posted that comment: https://web.archive.org/web/20260411112604/https://tboteproj... where they claim their website is "under surveillance" because it got a few thousand requests from Google Cloud et al, most of them to a single page. This really shows how low their standards are.
I share your wariness of the LLM garbage, but I believe the conclusions are correct. This has Facebook's stink all over it. I worked there and know of what I speak.
So we should believe the hallucinations because they sound like something that could be true? Does the LLM in the middle somehow makes it more trustworthy than if GP had just shared their own pattern-matching conjecture?
No. I think LLMs are garbage. Separately, and unrelated: I think Facebook is behind these bills. The LLM may be garbage and still sometimes produce a correct result.
Yes, it would be nice to know with certainty who is behind these bills. It sucks how much opaque money influences American politics.
Josh Gottheimer's press release[1] on HR8250 mentions the "Meta Parents Network." I don't know what that is, but it does have "Meta" in the name.
Buffy Wick's noise about AB1043 claimed it was passed with the support of tech companies. I have spoken directly to one person close to AB1043 who told me Facebook argued against AB1043. I have doubts. But if true, I suspect they were not arguing in good faith and had ulterior motives.
In the end, no matter who is secretly lobbying for or against age verification bills all over the planet, the bills are terrible, and we should fight them.
That sounds like it would be a completely different game and probably not as fun since you'd have to use some very fiddly controls to manually get into orbit. If you eliminate orbit entirely then it's just a slalom race. "Hitting" each star/planet is the immediate feedback that makes it fun.
Yes, give me weird orbits! I want a shot which is just outside the target area to get sucked in by the gravity of the planet, but potentially letting me slingshot around an intermediate planet towards a more distant one. The tap command should still mean “gravity disengaged, momentum still active“ to allow shifts from one orbit to another.
I wish people would stop sharing this website, their research is massively written by LLMs and looks good at a glance, but it goes in every direction at the same time and lacks logical connections. And the claims don't really match their sources.
Their initial publication was backed by a Git repository with hundreds of pages of documents written in just three days (https://web.archive.org/web/20260314224623/https://tboteproj...). It also contained nonsense like an "anomaly report" with recommendations from the LLM agent to itself, which covers an analysis of contributors to Linux's BPF, Android's Gerrit, and parser errors in using legislative databases. https://web.archive.org/web/20260314103202/https://tboteproj... . The repository was rewritten since, though.
This post follows their usual pattern. The second source they link to has been a dead link for 11 months (https://web.archive.org/web/20250501000000*/https://www.pala...). There's a lot about Persona's design, MCPs, vulnerabilities, data leaks, but nothing proving they use it for mass surveillance. The entire case for it being mass surveillance rests on two points: that they interact with AI companies and they offer MCP endpoints (section titled "Persona's Surveillance Architecture")
Thank you. Investigative journalism is so important and I would happily believe some of the claims made here, but when I encounter even just a few sentences that sound LLM-written, suddenly I don't trust any of the statements in the source anymore. This site goes way beyond that, with a vibe-coded UI and generated articles. There might be value in what's reported here, but currently it requires a lot of work from the reader.
The earlier you realize how little IQ and "knows a lot" means the person actually know what they're talking about, the easier life becomes. "Smart" people are wrong all the time, some say how they became smart in the first place.
> There's a lot about Persona's design, MCPs, vulnerabilities, data leaks, but nothing proving they use it for mass surveillance.
And this is where I'd say I disagree. There's nothing about Peter Thiel, and his current business focus, that shows anyone he's not in the business of surveillance. Look at the company he keeps and then align that with many of the things Peter and who he surrounds himself with have said publicly. Thiel is tied to Palantir and Alex Karp. That relationship alone should tell you very clearly that, even if Thiel wasn't actually in the game of surveillance (opinion: he is) he would be very much associated with supporting it.
Karp said: “I love the idea of getting a drone and having light fentanyl-laced urine spraying on analysts that tried to screw us.”
Yeah, sure... I mean I can't imagine the fact that Thiel is tied at the hip to Palantir that he doesn't have an agenda with it other than data analytics and, what, ad rev? Right.
Thiel said, publicly, that everyone should be concerned about surveillance AI [0]. Let's call spade a spade. Thiel is in the business of surveillance whether or not there's some poor LLM generated sites stating that is the case, but then using that as the basis to give Thiel a pass on this because: not enough evidence here.
Thiel is a big part of what's wrong with his class. He's worried about something that he wants to control. He's not actually worried about you or I though. He's worried about someone else having the full surveillance view and so he's aimed to build and be part of that. So, maybe, we shouldn't give Thiel a pass just because he hasn't fully proven himself to be the person that the world paints him into a picture of.
That's cute, but they've taken his money. To say they've never interacted with him is disingenuous. And... Are we really going to default to a perspective of trust from Persona? Nobody should trust them by default as they've proven nothing to the public with regard to trustworthiness.
I support a rule to ban AI-generated/edited posts.
Initially I thought they'd be fine, because AI-generated isn't intrinsically an issue and the comments can be good. But in practice, the AI posts tend to be slop, and usually there's a better human-written source for the same topic (for example, one of the many other recent "age verification is mass surveillance" posts here).
Part of this was written by AI, but with a human in "charge" who
explained which part of AI was used here. Would that also be a
bannable example for you? I am not so convinced that this is
bannable per se. Perhaps it may be different if the AI-slop was
not announced, but when it was announced and explained?
> one of the many other recent "age verification is mass surveillance"
> posts here
Well, it actually is. It taps very much into other similar laws
e. g. "chat control", aka chat sniffing.
I should've said "guideline". I think posts can include AI if it's reasonable and/or they're good, while the guideline gives a reason to flag AI posts that are generally bad.
> It taps very much into other similar laws e. g. "chat control", aka chat sniffing.
There are many recent Chat Control posts here too. I agree Chat Control is bad, and poorly-implemented age verification is bad (though it can be implemented in privacy-preserving ways, albeit ineffectively; I commented about this 42 days ago at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47123507, and it was stale then). I don't want to hear anymore about it. Maybe I need a filter myself, for the lucky 10,000. But the problem even for them, is that the repeated posts (without links to previous posts) have mostly low-effort comments, because people who made high-effort comments can't/won't keep repeating them.
> In the meantime a FOSS maintainer who is just trying to put the pieces in place to comply with the law (as written) got doxxed and harassed.
In my experience, when a country like Britain passes a censorship law, people in other countries like America don't enjoy being given the tools to comply with it, even if the tools are entirely optional.
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