I’m really not trying to sell this one, though a quick google turned up a Newsweek article about the Japanese weighing in.
Otherwise, didn’t they round up a bunch of doubles when the Ukraine war broke out? that recent Putin Judo practice video was kind of strange. I’m no fan, though I’m pretty sure Putin was a real badass in his day and that guy looked kind of lacking. We all get old!
I have a question that's been going through my mind -
Why is age verification connected with identity verification?
I understand why the former is not possible with the latter, but my question is -
Whichever entity is responsible for the verification can just pass on the age verification confirmation without passing through any of the other details, right?
Am I mistaken here? Because if this was possible, I could still go ahead with using the VPN.
This seems to be what "double-blind" verification is doing:
> The report highlights emerging approaches, such as “double-blind” verification systems used in France, where websites receive only confirmation that a user meets age requirements without learning the user's identity, while the verification provider does not see which websites the user visits.
It's a question of blind trust in your government to respect this, when they themselves control the age verification apps, at least in the EU who wants to impose its own system and not rely on an autonomous third party.
It is cryptography. Just like you don't have to blindly trust Signal with end-to-end encryption (their client app is open source), it could be implemented in a way that you don't need to blindly trust your government.
> Why is age verification connected with identity verification?
With the EU's current approach, disconnecting the two is the exact point. There is no third party, the government ID you already have can be used to verify your age directly with an online service.
You are right, it is possible to do age verification in a privacy-preserving manner. Feels like most people being very vocal against the idea don't know about that.
At least most complaints I see here are assuming that age verification means tracking.
Too bad, there could be interesting discussions about privacy-preserving age verification, if people just bothered getting informed before complaining.
We already have privacy preserving age verification: the website asks for your age (or just whether you're over 18), and lets you through.
There's no issuing party to collude with to deanonymize users, no hard requirement on owning a Google- or Apple-vetted smartphone, and generally no way to identify me besides my choice of random numbers.
You move past that, and people rightfully tell you that your scheme outright breaks privacy, or that it makes too many assumptions or is too complex to easily verify it actually preserves privacy.
> You move past that, and people rightfully tell you that your scheme outright breaks privacy, or that it makes too many assumptions or is too complex to easily verify it actually preserves privacy.
Encryption is too complex to easily verify it actually protects your data. Still you use it all the time without even knowing it.
From a tech perspective it has been a solved problem since about a decade ago, via DID (decentralised identities) and their Verifiable Proofs.
The EU digital wallet framework is built around those, and your suggested scenario is a first class citizen.
It is now moving from the academic/research world, to the political field, and feedback/pressure from both commercial groups and political agendas is muddling the field.
Here are some links to canonical docs, you can easily find high quality videos that explain this is shorter/simpler terms to get a grasp of it.
Buying alcohol online without having to show a website or a delivery driver my social security number is a challenge that needs solving. Same with picking up expensive parcels from package drop-off points in my country.
You can debate whether setting up such a system for things like social media is a necessity or desired in the first place, but being able to show someone a QR code that verifies my name and age without exposing all kinds of other details about me is extremely useful.
I'm sure Twitter knows which are the bot accounts and is surely excluding them from their model training. Twitter bots aren't a new phenomenon after all.
I don't think Twitter/X know for sure who the bots are, since Elon has been pretty vocal about trying to stop them for ages, yet I still get lots of spam DMs (as do others with far fewer followers/reach).
Even if 95% of the spam gets actively reported and dealt with, that still leaves a ton of nonsense on the platform, getting fed into the LLM. And spam has only gotten worse over the years, as the barrier to entry has lowered and lowered.
Are the spam DMs advertisements or more generally something linked to a product or service? I wouldn't be surprised if X is more lenient towards bots that pay them for adverts.
Most of what I get seem to be advertisements or automated messages if you follow large(r) accounts.
One of the most interesting things that I've noticed is these advertisements will be triggered if you follow accounts that are positioned as influencers. I followed one out of curiosity and received a DM from that account advertising some cryptocurrency service.
It's a good way to filter out and block accounts that have almost certainly not grown organically.
I'd have guessed that at least some of the bots are Twitter itself, trying to draw you in with some sense of engagement. Given that Musk is the owner, and everything we know about him and have seen him do, I'd not be surprised if some of the MAGA bots are his too.
There is bots everywhere, it has nothing to do with the platform, it has to do with attackers having an incentive to do mass account farming, no platform is secure against it.
Super easy, just make a web-of-trust type of thing: messages are only visible to those who already vouched for you. Otherwise, you pay $0.01/per message/per user reached.
By buying accounts, you are buying reputation. By paying for the posts, you are maybe paying for reach at first, but (a) it will be costly and (b) it does not guarantee that the reached ones will spread anything further.
Yes your individual feed isn't really relevant if we talk about the masses, Reddit accounts are for sale quite cheap, HN as well, X too and so-on, it's literally just a matter of means/methodology. If I want today to do 1000 random posts talking about a certain thing, I could.
OpenAI has already been proven to be easily gamed through very unsophisticated poisoning (fake information in a web page + an edit to a wiki page pointing at it, fake information in a reddit post), so I'm not sure we shoudl hold up their efforts at data cleaning as a gold standard.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48019219
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